It’s almost end of year. It seems for some time before I would write these retrospective blog posts. Focusing on what 2024 meant to me and for me. Maybe ending on 2025. That end could be the line dotted and dashed leading to a new post end of next year. It’s early though. I still have 4 days to write this if I go with the year ending thing. Or I can just write now. Find those ends of the lines stopping rather prematurely before 31 December.
Much of the year I’ve spent walking and living this life in Cambodia. Found a lot of happiness and some sorrow. Both things were like the stops and starts of things. My life seemed to be good generally but I’m a pessimist. I never look for the good or what it would take to be happy. I guess I’m convinced happiness is severely overrated and not well understood.
A question I asked this year,
Does happiness start on the inside or out?
Do we need to find it first within ourselves and then it finds the way to our expressions and physical feelings. Or do we find it on the outside and then somehow it penetrates in.
Sitting here for morning coffee I find the private and for me take. I can be happy on the inside. Have that indescribable joy and happiness which sometimes comes from such simple endeavors. Most of them solitary. So perhaps only having meanings for me. So with that I find things and memories and sometimes people that give me the inner thing. Rarely though does it permeate to outside. I don’t see the need to make it do that. It seems sufficient for me to feel it.
The other way rarely happens. I am not happy surrounded by others. So external forces and what they bring cannot translate to inner joy. The exception is my wife which seems to be both in and outside. The feeling of love and admiration is a quiet inner thing. Being with her translates to an outer one.
Unfortunately I don’t feel that way around others. As I’ve grown old I’ve found more reasons to distance myself from people. My wife loves the people. The social arena. Her life goes from social network to friends to family both biological and social. For her happiness definitely is an outer thing that gives her the trademark smile. On the outside. She has told me,
If you are unhappy inside just hide it and smile on the outside.
This is something I can’t do. I cannot pretend. I asked a Khmer friend about this and he told me they are taught from birth to do this. To hide true feelings. To just look happy. My friend Russell calls it “indoctrination”. When we last talked he said this one thing he would see over and over again. He decided he had to move from Cambodia because of how he felt in society and culture here. So when he gets back to Asia will live in Vietnam. I can see the reasoning. He wants to understand the inner and outer feelings. Find peace where both can exist. Not feel limited by what he sees here.
So it all came around on inside and outside. More lines ending. More to be traced. So I slow down on my coffee. Think about the two worlds. They feel mutually exclusive at times. My wife seems light years away. She wants the happiness on the outside feelings. I can’t do it. So she just accepts honesty.
Sometimes.
And now I can write on other things. Not solving or putting down the whole inside to outside feelings.
I don’t mean this to be some tome. Some novel or huge reflection on my 2024. Instead I want to see where it all went. Where the lines go. So I have a few more lines to connect or end. Sorry in advance for the length. It’s just my 2024 ending. Not yours.
I guess it’s fair to say I have two families. An almost estranged one in America and a Khmer family here. I love both but I also don’t feel some need to be around them. In America it’s my daughter. Here it’s my mom and one son in law and my daughter in law. 2024 has seemed to be the year of losing more of the American one and gaining more here. Perhaps they offset and life just goes on.
Here I have this larger family my wife will tell me loves me. I don’t love some of them. One brother in law I’ve asked to never be around me again because of his drinking behaviors. My wife’s sister visits now without him. Many of the other family I feel I can do with or without. There’s nothing I particularly want from them. Including seeing them.
I know it sounds mean and low but that’s where the lines go in 2024. I don’t think they change in 2025. Even if my wife would hope otherwise.
This concept seems sometimes mysterious to me here. I don’t understand how it works or why people that will exclaim they are friends will do so much to make it seem less. My mom used to tell me,
When someone says they have your best interests at heart run for the hills.
How many times I have heard so called friends use the words “best interests at heart”. Here one particular Khmer person who forever told us of her love and devotion, then cheated on us. Lied and stole from us. We did not run for the hills when we should have. So I often doubt the rationale about friendship. It’s fair to say I don’t understand it.
One person I worked with told me I was too demanding in friendship. I had told him I expected him to give to me what he was willing to part with and I would do the same. We would meet at a mutually agreeable point. If we could not meet, it was not friendship. It was something else.
So yeah I don’t get the concept. And I stopped trying.
So it brings me finally to 2025. The year that almost is. I have no golden rules or goals or resolutions. I don’t want to understand family or friends any better. Or to figure out what happiness is. If I have it inside I got it. Forgive me or not if I don’t show it.
So that’s a 2024. Lots said. More meant. Less understood. But more examined. Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Well yeah. I also saved this Maya Angelou quote to leave you with.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
I’ve felt those words many times. Not lived them to my peril and unhappiness. The lines don’t end. Not really. It’s like the Morse code of life. I hear them. Feel them. The dots and dashes. The punctuation of heartbeats and emotions. It all carries through in 2024 or does not. In 4 days though, it will be something else.
Now I just watch 2025.