#43 Improve Our Transitions
Jun 23rd, 2008 by doing better
When I call my boyfriend in the evenings, we often have a great conversation, and then he ruins the whole thing by hustling me off the phone without warning because he wants to brush his teeth or go to bed or something exciting like that. I know he has to get up early and he doesn’t have much free time, but it still feels like a slap in the face. Even if all has been well up to that point, I hang up the phone feeling as if we have started a fight, and the feeling can linger through the night and the next day. With phone arguments, there is no way to hug each other and get over it. There’s just the insomnia, the urge to send nasty text messages, and the promises to myself never to call him again.
Tonight I was talking and he said suddenly, “I’m going to go now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I said, “You need to work on your transitions.”
He said, “But I have to iron my shirt.”
Grrr.
At least he called back later and apologized.
On the other hand, why am I so offended? Why am I expecting him to be nice? I am reading an amazing novel, The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. (This book is what I was talking about tonight when my boyfriend cut me off.) It tells the story of a harelipped, supposedly simple-minded gardener who makes a journey through war-ravaged apartheid South Africa. He is repeatedly imprisoned in camps and harassed by the police for being a vagrant and not having the right travel permit and identification papers, but he never seems offended by other people’s behaviour towards him. He doesn’t expect people to treat him well. All he wants is to find a place in the world where he can live freely, even if it means living alone in the wilderness. He doesn’t ask for a nice house, a lot of stuff, or even other human companionship. It is a beautiful book. Today I was comparing my life and my expectations to Michael K’s and thinking how, compared to him, I live like a billionaire. The level of security and companionship and hope that I enjoy is something that he cannot even dream of. Then I thought how strange it is that I am constantly finding things to be annoyed about, even though I live in this comparative paradise. Why do I expect people to treat me with “respect” or be “nice” to me or live up to all these standards in my head? No one is nice to Michael K, but that isn’t really the point. He just wants to be free of confinement and to be allowed to live with dignity – that is his unattainable paradise.