"I" vs. "We"

I (we) spent the better part of the morning talking about the "I" vs. "we" dilemma we find ourselves in nearly everyday, in most discussions and in the ways we try to make decisions about what we are going to do together.

We talked about crunch points and this is certainly one of them - maybe the central one of our lives together. We figured out that the content is really unimportant - the content changes all the time but the crunch point occurs all the time. The discussion goes something like this:

"What should we do with our time today?"K says.

I say,"well, I don't know what we should do with our time."

"We should do something."

"Yes, we should."

At this point, I get frustrated and I want to scream at K and say, "what the hell do you want to do today - just spit it out. If you don't say anything about what you want to do, we can go around and around and never get anyplace with this discussion and then I want to leave the room. It's like saying 'Call 911'. Who's supposed to call 911? You , me, who? And then the discussion falls apart because K feels threatened by my tone of voice (frustration) and I get up and leave. K feels unsafe and I feel totally frustrated that nothing has been decided.

So,we're in this continuous loop - a conditioned loop of endless variations where the content changes but the outcome is about the same. I insist that for anything to get started or negotiated, someone has to put something on the table for discussion. Some idea, SOMETHING to have a discussion about. I think that that only comes from the place of "I." I want this or that. It gives the discussion an opening serve. Then the other person can return the serve but passing the ball back with an idea of their own. And so it can go back and forth until there is a conclusion or agreement about what "we" are going to do. Maybe we will do something together - maybe we won't. But until there is something on the table to discuss, I go my way and K can go the other way.

So, somehow we seems to spin around and around on this axis point but never really stray very far from it. The circle might be wide or narrow, but in the end, it always boils down to this one crunch point. And therein lies the problem.

At some point, it might be easier to just give up and take the ball and go play with someone else. The first few years of any relationship seem to be filled with fewer moments of really hard core disagreement and that makes it easier, but in the end, they all spiral down to the issues that are crunch points. Crunch points just are. As I said before, sometimes people just avoid those points by giving in and rolling their eyes and acquiescing, and others just go looking and find someone else to start the cycle all over with, but few really actually work through the whole thing so that pattern can be disassembled.

At some point in the discussion, I knew that we haven't moved beyond the same crunch point since the very inception of our relationship and in one brief moment, knew that we did not have the wherewithal to figure this out. We keep doing the same thing over and over and over. And yet, something popped in today - when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

We are going to try several things - a mixture of several things that we know about. We are reading a books called Being Zen by Ezra Bayda. He talks about keeping track of thoughts and moving from thinking to experiencing. Since I am mostly a thinker, and K is mostly an "experiencer," we are proposing that we switch roles and move into the other position for awhile to see what we can do with "we" and "I" from those perspectives. We are also followers of process work and in doing so, we are thinking that the "experiencing" part of this might include all of the ways in which issues present themselves in process work - from kinesthetic to world work. There might be some value in paying attention to the flirts, our dreams, our physical movements as well as the feelings about things. So, we are headed down a blind alley, but one that seems to offer some other way of dissecting this issue. One thing we have both learned over the years is that doing anything differently than we are currently doing it will change the situation. And that's what we're attempting to do here.

Move us off the dime.

Wish us luck.