When Cliché Comes True

I asked who else she had brought up here; who else she had let into her secret place.

"Nobody," she let fall from her lips.

"Nobody else.....just you."

I am not sure if this is necessarily the wisest course of action, but I feel it is perhaps the right choice nonetheless. And to that end, I say to Hell with ‘wise’.

In introducing this blog, I will attempt to put a veeery long story as short as I can (which is unfortunately not particularly short even at that). At 23 years of age I fell madly in love with the woman whom I intuitively feel, deep at the center of my being, to be my soul mate... my twin flame. We met in Milan, Italy where for the last few years we were classmates in graduate school at Università Bocconi studying Economics & Management in the Arts, Culture, Media, and Entertainment.

As the name suggests (especially to anyone who may be familiar with the particular reputation of our university) this was not your typical, run-of-the mill master’s program in which the most ambitious go-getters enroll in order to land the high paying dream job upon graduating. In that regard, it is important that I bring up this background information because such a specialized, cross-cultural interdisciplinary program with such a glaringly low likelihood of leading to any sort of employment from which one could realistically earn a livelihood would really only appeal to a certain type of individual. I was one of them, and so was she.

She is absolutely amazing across every facet of her being, even those yet unpolished. Her endless love for the immediate beauty of life abound is contagious....

.... be it classic cinema, live theatre, mystical poetry, culinary experimentation, walks in nature,

or even at times my own musical endeavors.

Coming from a less than perfect upbringing, that she is far and away the most compassionate, open, and inspiring woman I have ever met sets her apart....

... as one of the angels that walk among us here on this Earth. 

Out of respect for her privacy I won’t disclose her name, though I itch to....

... for the melody with which it rings out would pass through even the most petrified of veneers.

She comes from Turkey, and the term of endearment we most often used when referring to each other was aşkım, which translates more or less to “my beloved.”

So that is what we will call her, because a name is just arbitrary

but my Beloved is who she really is...

Unfortunately, what I am writing is not a simple braggadocio of what a lucky son of a bitch I am....

... though indeed I was. 

Nor is it intended to recount the view I have seen from the mountaintop so that others too may find their way to share in the glory of this gaze....

 ... though I have seen it, and I do hope that there are those out there who take away something from this so that they might also find themselves experiencing a similar bliss in their own lives. 

This is an open book about the year-long out-of-body experience from which I am now coming back

and as such I should forewarn that what you will read, should you choose to continue, is not all rainbows and butterflies, nor does it have the fairytale happy ending one might expect-at least not yet.

That is where you all come in, and that is why I am now choosing to share all of this with you - whoever you are. 

"Everything works out in the end...

If it hasn’t worked out yet, then it’s not the end…"

Consider this a glimpse into the essence of the shared Human Experience through the aperture of one man’s heart. My name is Jared Kimball, and this is the story of

When Cliché Comes True

She moved back to Istanbul after graduating last winter....

... while I returned to my home in central Illinois just a few short months later after finishing my thesis and going through the pomp and circumstance of my own graduation. 

Always true to my self-maximizing ways, I wanted to squeeze every last day out of living in Italy that my student visa would allow, and thus dragged my feet accordingly in writing my thesis - my sloth so extreme that I even found myself still writing the actual words of my thesis while riding the city bus in my pajamas on my way to submit the "finished" work to my advisor less than an hour before the deadline. Imagine this scene, if you will. Then recall that all of this is taking place IN MILAN!!! The irony was not lost on me, not even for a minute. 

My Beloved returned to Milan for the week of my graduation and it was then that I finally had the opportunity to introduce her to the members of my family who were able to make the trip over from the US on my behalf.

I alluded earlier to her having a less than pristine upbringing, so crossing that threshold and bringing her into the embrace of my wonderful family was a moment that I had been looking forward to since we first started dating. 

After that week they all left; my family returned to the US, my Beloved, to Turkey. Walking away from the shuttle bus that took her to the airport from the Milan train station was the last glimpse that I saw of the woman with whom I was so effortlessly certain that I would share life’s journey.... 

... until the ground swallowed us whole.

Well, it was the last time I saw her. That is until...well, I’ll get there ;-) 

In the name of brevity I won’t weigh down this post with a swath of anecdotes detailing how magical our life in Love together really was. For your sake and my own, just trust me: it was the real thing...

 It was the subject of poetic reflection...

it was transcendental...

it was True...

it was a union of souls...

and it is what opened my eyes to a world beyond my own, beginning the process of what, for the sake of convenience, I will just call my spiritual awakening. Nothing of the mundane could really be used to justly convey the power that grew from our relationship, not even language itself. 

“There is a transcendental dimension beyond language… 

...It's just hard as hell to talk about."

-Terence McKenna

While the means through which we accessed this realm were not quite the same as McKenna's ;-) 

I can confirm that this notion is not simply a metaphor or literary device, but in fact a literal truth. 

 For just over a year of my life, I walked with one foot in this world....

... and one in another. 

And to anyone who may find this a bit confounding or cryptic, allow me to just spell it out:

L

O

V 

E 

The transcendental dimension beyond language is Love. It is a metaphysical 'place', and more so than anywhere else that I have been fortunate enough to visit, it is here, in Love, where I wish to settle and live out the rest of my days.

Paradise lost…

Over the course of our year plus together, owing mainly to the typical forms of friction brought about by having a relationship with someone who embodies the prototypical “rational” Western man in all of his lucrative personality flaws (flaws which I saw as my "character" and "principles" at the time and even up until these last several months) I allowed her to fall into a state of complete emotional and physical exhaustion.  It turns out that 25 years of cultural conditioning in which the mechanistic mind machine has the final say in filtering our reality can really do a number on how a person is able to respond to matters that have little or nothing to do with analytical decision-making.  Old, crusty white guys and their dogmatic belief systems shouldn't really have anything to do with regulating a woman's access to reproductive healthcare, and my rational mind doesn't really have much use in understanding matters of the heart, and yet that is exactly what I allowed to happen in the case of my Beloved and I.  Although I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time, my complete subservience to my mind put me in the no-win situation of intellectualizing the suffering of my soul mate, the woman whose happiness meant more to me than my own (or so my self had me convinced).  I think most can relate to this dilemma, both men and women, of failing to recognize when the mind is no longer serving us and should instead be substituted out in favor of the heart.

"How is this hurting you?  HOW is this possibly hurting you?  You shouldn't be suffering because of this for reasons A, B, and C and all you have to do to fix this is X, Y, and Z."

And the reason I was so stuck in that one particular mode is mainly a result not only of the conditioning of growing up in a Western society which does not equip its members with any capacity to walk the Middle Path, but also of the hyper-intellectualization that comes part and parcel with 7 consecutive years of business school inculcation; my intellect had become a lethal weapon.  I was sharp.  The on-the-go sociologist/psychologist handing out unsolicited diagnoses wherever the good people may be in need.  The reason that my poor Beloved struggled so mightily to get through to me - to no avail whatsoever - eventually to the point of throwing in the towel out of exhaustion,  was??? .......because I was right.  My "A, B, C so do X, Y, Z there, problem solved," none of that was ever wrong.  Okay, it was very rarely 'wrong'.  But the more I was presented with her suffering, the more committed I became to solving it through the rational mind.  But what was wrong with that scenario was that I should ever have even entered into that mode of thinking in the first place when my Beloved was opening her heart and sharing her suffering with me.  I can not even tell you how many times I was told verbatim, "Jared, you are making me suffer.  Please - PLEASE - try not to do this.  I really can't take it and it's exhausting me."

I'll let that sink in for just a minute...

How could I not see it?  How could I have possibly been so blind?  How could I have ignored her words when it was all being spelled out right before me?  Why was I unable to see what I was doing, where I was steering the sinking ship?  Why could I not feel the truth in her words, that I was in fact contributing to her suffering in a way that should have been so easy for me to choose to discontinue?  And for what, principle??  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???  What kind of a principle is it to stick to one's "principles" out of "principle," when sticking to that "principle" nullifies the situation?  Now it's all moot.  No more need for enforcing my rules, because there is no more game to be played.  And what good did ANY of it ever do me??  I'll tell you what it got me.  It gave me a cancer of the soul that just would not stop spreading.  Animus - what a cunning little bastard you are, indeed.

"You gotta recognize that different people suffer in different ways and for you to interpret someone else's suffering on the basis of whether you would suffer in that condition is a fallacy. You can not assume that somebody else is suffering just because you would suffer in that circumstance...or the opposite. That's where it becomes interesting that when you have learned to convert your own suffering it is still not fair or appropriate to assume that someone else either wants to or can convert their suffering. And their suffering is very real for them. And you have to listen in each case to hear what the nature of the suffering is and how you can alleviate it. And the game is to be responsive, rather than reactive, to suffering." 

-Ram Dass

I returned to the US in early June and we have been separated ever since, and unfortunately I do not just mean in terms of our geographic positioning.  It has been a tremendously challenging summer to say the least. However, it was and still is from this garden of struggling to make sense of the subsequent stream of suffering that I have come to understand myself through the perspective of my Beloved’s heart.  For it was only after completely exhausting my old models of formulating an understanding of my reality and still coming up with no plausible explanations to how we reached this point that I finally had no choice but to go beyond my old self.

Through the poetically tragic combination of each day applying empathy and mindfulness with greater ease in my attempts to make sense of what had happened between us and what role I played in the culpability of her suffering, together with the steadfast intuition that "it wasn't supposed to happen like this," I was forced into waking up more and more to the way that it really was, opening up my heart completely to the way that it had been all along.  I could not stop the momentum that was opening up my heart and from that, with each day that passed after I returned home, I was feeling more and more of the very same suffering that I caused my Beloved to endure. It was Hell, but I would so much rather live with the consequences of being the servant of my own empathic heart rather than the slave of my cold calculating mind-master.  It sucked, but I knew I had no choice.  With each day I was feeling everything more lucidly, without my own defenses to distort the Truth of it all.  I was also growing to new levels of understanding.  This is where it really turns into a Tragedy (in the poetic sense of the term) because the more I came to understand, the more I began to see that it HAD to happen this way.  As long as I still had something to defend (my ego, my being "right" in our relationship, who I thought I was) I was never going to let go of who I was.  And who was I?  I was the son of a bitch that had just cost my Self the best thing that had ever happened to me.

So I really could not grow fast enough.  Reading, watching lectures, developing a spiritual practice, speaking with friends and family, all of it was giving me new insights into just what was actually going on.  But with each new day in which I understood everything - in which I moved farther away

 from being the guy that caused all of this mess - I also moved one day further into being 

one day too late.

"No."  It just couldn't be.  Could the universe really have such a sick sense of humor?  I was more sure than ever that I had not been mistaken and that in fact I, little old me, had indeed found a palpable connection through my Beloved to this plane of reality called "Love."  The train was starting to depart and all I could do was run as fast as I could alongside, banging on the window next to her window seat shouting "I got it!  I figured it out!  You were right, you really were.  And now I see that!  It's happening!  I'm becoming who I needed to be all along!"  But she was exhausted from the struggle, barely even conscious.  She couldn't hear me.... It was the part of the story where the audience, removed from the actual unfolding of the drama, weeps out of frustration and sympathy, seeing full well how close our dear protagonist was to righting the wrong and securing the happy ending that everybody was hoping to see.

Ever since I can remember I have always resonated deeply with authentic expressions along the continuum of human experiences. This, together with the many reminders from my parents of how thoughtful and selfless I was as a little boy, would, I suppose, indicate that empathy has held a place in the forefront of my being since a time even before I had any notions of morals or piety. At the age of 7 I was moved to tears when I went to the cinema with my mother to see the film Titanic. But I remember it so vividly - it was not the witnessing of thousands of people suffering horrendous deaths that moved me, it was the clear display of Jack’s unconditional love for Rose throughout the whole story, but particularly in preparing her for what was to come in submerging beneath the surface and his heart-wrenching monologue that followed. He practically gave her the X’s and O’s on how to escape from Hell! Now DON’T get me started on the logistics of the available space on the floating door. But his act of making Rose promise that she would go on to lead a love-filled life, followed by her releasing his frozen body from her grip with “I’ll never let go, Jack” just absolutely shattered me. I was somehow experiencing in my own subjective reality what I was watching be projected onto a large screen in a darkened room surrounded by strangers. Again, this is a seven-year-old boy who, for what it’s worth, would later go on to earn two varsity letters in high school as a two-way starter for the football team (American football, that is)!

**Side note** if you can think back for a moment to the movie Superbad, when Jonah Hill’s character tells the story of his childhood fascination with depicting the male genitalia – same thing with me, except I drew the Titanic…everywhere!

"It's not even that big of a deal, something like 8% of kids do it but whatever."

So how is it that a child with such an open heart could grow into a callused machine?  Well, what makes it all even harder to comprehend is that there was obviously something in me that drew my Beloved and I together.  I mean, if I were a complete asshole she never would have put up with me for a day, right?  See, paradoxically, I've actually always identified very much as a hopeless romantic.  It was always me who was giving more in past relationships and never seeing the same love returned to me, wondering "is this as good as it gets?  Am I expecting too much?  How will I know when it's love?"  To this end, the connection between my Beloved and I was instant and without scrutiny.  From the moment we began seeing each other, the deep attraction was undeniable.  More than that, it was effortless.  I never once felt a need to try to be attractive, and neither did she.  It was simply each of our souls responding to the presence of the other's.  It was all so natural.  And it was beautiful.  To witness this all happening to ME - FINALLY!!  The first few months were beyond electric.

Shortly after we began seeing each other she left for Paris to do a 3 month internship working for an international film festival.  She was following her heart.  We had only been together for a couple of weeks at that point, so neither of us really knew what would become of this brand new relationship.  "Whatever happens, it's been a real joy thus far and I am extremely thankful for the time that we have spent together."  Yeah, that sufficed for about one week.  I went straight to searching on the discount airline websites and found a round-trip flight for €36.  The Universe was telling me that I was allowed to really let myself go for this girl.  Without having thought about it ahead of time, once I was on the shuttle bus from the airport to downtown Paris I just kept thinking in my head, "I think I love her.  I mean, do I?  It's so soon.  But I also don't give a shit about how long it's been, I know that doesn't really matter.  Yeah, I really want to tell her, too.  Far out!"  And I did, that night.  And there was no nervousness whatsoever (which was kind of new for me).  Uncertainty, of course, but no nerves.  Her response I'll never forget.  Lying with her head on my shoulder, she looked up and let out a soft, adorable little laugh, looked into my eyes, and said "awww Jared" - NOT a good start - "I know you do."  And then she kissed me, put her head back on my shoulder, and about a second later, as if she'd forgotten her main line in the scene, she followed that promptly with "I love you too." :-)

Again, I'm still not understanding where things went wrong?  Well, I didn't, not immediately after splitting up I guess.  But it didn't take long to start connecting the dots.  Once I shifted my awareness from my head to my heart and got whatever that first glimpse of how things really had played out, it was like discovering my own Rosetta Stone.  All it took was seeing one thing clearly, and then eeeeeverything else was laid out clearly for me to revisit, and I couldn't do it quickly enough.  Although the growth was occurring so quickly that I almost got a high off of it, it certainly wasn't painless - what growth is?  Have you ever put on 20lbs of muscle during an off-season?  Yeah, the process of growing the body requires a bit of tolerance for discomfort.

It was extremely hard to revisit our relationship in my mind - particular memories, general tendencies, whatever - because after each "Ah-HA" moment there would inevitably follow an "ohhhhh my god.....did I seriously?" ....... I had to put up with a lot of feeling disappointed in my past self, in the past choices I had made that did in fact lead us to this end.  She was not being overly dramatic in saying "you are causing me suffering, PLEASE try not to do this."  I saw it now, I saw all of it...exactly how it had really been all along.  And I wasn't just fooling myself because I missed her and if I let go of my need to be right then I could simply apologize for whatever wrongs I had committed and we could make up and get back together - believe me, by this point I had apologized for everything that I could come up with.  No, the reason I was now beginning to see how she had been right is... because she was.  Even if I was 99% golden, the 1% of rotten in me had taken its toll and consumed the very life force which sustained those higher states of consciousness to which I had so happily grown accustomed.

But for every effort that I made to convey this metamorphosis to my Beloved, the more she seemed to have sheltered herself inside of a cocoon of "I'm sorry, it's too late."  The mental obstacles were obscuring the path back into where I was certain we could both meet again.  It all seemed to be a fate sicker than any I could have devised for even my worst enemy (thought that's not saying much as I am not a particularly vindictive person).  And with 10,000 miles separating us and online communication being the only way to contact each other, it was just too easy for her to ignore all of what I was experiencing.  And I can't honestly blame her, I can't blame her for anything at all.  Sure she could have exhibited quite a bit more patience and that would have avoided a lot of the tensions that arose between us, but because these tensions were systematically being produced by my own endogenous baggage, any greater patience on her part would have simply prolonged the inevitable.  Again, it had to happen the way it had happened - but what now?  What do I do now?  I'll do ANYTHING now, but what can I do?

“I know it’s cliché, but it’s true!” These days, that is how I find myself surmising everything about what we had, defending the believability or the sincerity of it all. It was already damn near impossible for me to try to make sense of the whirlwind of what we had been through together, both as individuals and as a unified whole, beyond our own separateness as two souls in two bodies. But now I was having to distill the ineffability of it all it into palpable units of evidence that I could use to assure those around me, so as to ease their own fear-gripped minds, that "no, I am not insane" and "no, I am not exaggerating the immensity of it all as a symptom of some sort of schizophrenia or delusions of grandeur."  The depths to which she entered my being I cannot really describe, even still to this day I always come up short.  I can only relay what I have come to understand through trying to work through the grieving process.  In terms of the 'philosophical vocabulary' I use on my own path of spiritual awakening, I work primarily with ‘attachment’ and the role it plays in generating suffering.  So when it came time to accept what I was being told, that she was trying to move on and I should too, I honed my grieving efforts in on my attachment to her, to us, to the experience of it all.

What I realized in a relatively short period of time was that my heart was not exactly attached to her, per se. What was going on was something far trickier than that.  It seemed that she had laid within me a claim to my soul; to detach from her – to remove from my being the presence she kept there, albeit unintentionally – would have meant a complete removal of my heart. They had become one and the same. 

In employing empathy as a tool for working on my self, I developed a sort of mantra during the later periods of this grieving process:

Beloved, become me.

I should confess that this phrase was specifically what I had set out as my “intent” before engaging in a certain method of psychonautic reflection, but it has been just as useful since then as a perspective for me to maintain as it was a direction in which I aimed to go.  I think it’s similar to the idea of WWJD, or what Ram Dass describes as “cultivating the Witness” whereby one, rather than experiencing his or her own thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. through one’s own point of awareness, instead witnesses it all unfolding through the eyes of another being, ideally someone very purified and absent of agenda who would want only to see us be free of our own suffering. Although as an exercise it is definitely a bit unnatural at the beginning and requires some conscious effort to execute, I have found very few ways more effective at making it not only easy, but unavoidable, to get.my.shit.together.

Getting to the point at long last I reached a point of desperation during late August where no amount of energy I put into allowing myself to grieve provided any degree of relief whatsoever.  I am an avid listener of Daniele Bolelli's fantastic podcast, The Drunken Taoist - c'mon, a badass interdisciplinary author/philosopher, professor, trained martial artist, AND he's from Milan?  How could I not love him.  I tend to skip around between new and old episodes of the podcast and I do not believe it to be a coincidence that it was then, in that period of my deepest despair, when - after the powerful experience of listening to Daniele tell the story of meeting and marrying his wife, her battle with and eventual succumbing to cancer, and how he managed to go on living despite the unimaginable suffering - that I really sensed an impossible to miss sign (through the glowing of my own "soul's heart" if you will) that my path in this life IS in one way or another through this woman, my Beloved.

I immediately used my credit card to buy a plane ticket on just 2 days notice which I absolutely could not afford (looming student debt, persistent unemployment, you know the game) and flew to Turkey unannounced to show up on her doorstep the morning of her 27th birthday.  I will spare the details of the actual experience of being there - because as you can tell by now, "succinct" is not something I particularly specialize in - but this completely insane act of mine more or less fulfilled its intended purpose of putting us together in direct contact with both each other and with the Love that had grown with such fervor out of our relationship to each other.  

 

Guys and gals - it preeeeetty much worked!  I mean it by no means went smoothly, but short of her crying and running jumping into my arms I really could not have hoped for anything more than exactly the way it all played out.   I now feel no other choice but to follow my 'heart signal' (albeit at first begrudgingly, as this is NOT going to be even remotely easy) and move to Istanbul so that we can have a chance of being together.

My not-so-well-thought-out idea is that, in keeping with my hopeless romanticism and affirmed faith in the power of love, maybe just maybe it might be possible to use this blog post as a sort of plea to anyone out there in the cyberspaces who might either:
-live in Turkey 
or
-have some sort of work connections there
To stay in Turkey any longer than a few months I would need to obtain a work visa, and despite my two degrees from relatively revered institutions I am still finding it extremely difficult to be considered for anything beyond teaching English (which is probably what I will do as a necessary start, but it’s not really sustainable). My Beloved, also in possession of two diverse degrees from highly respected business universities, has been in the very same difficult situation since graduating almost a year ago and this prolonged period of trials and tribulation has understandably taken its toll. But nonetheless, my thinking is that in a city of 18 million, for a 25 year-old native English speaker with two degrees, lots of international experience, a penchant for breaking out of dualistic cultural conditioning, and a heart that finally speaks louder than his thoughts, there must exist at least one way to make this a reality.

Now, in finally going through what I think it means to "become a man," I am surrendering (again, begrudgingly) to my own faith in the omniscience of true Love, casting fear aside (of which there is a plenty in this scenario), and choosing to transform my desires into constructing my reality despite lacking a single guarantee that this has any realistic chance of succeeding. But I am trained as a statistical analyst (snooooooze) and so I have noticed this trend: when the indicator by which I make my decisions is the sensation of intuitive knowing, the resulting path always works out. It does not always work, per se, but in the end it always works out. When I do not live in this way and instead default to living exclusively as a servant to the mechanics of my mind?  Well, that is precisely what got me into this predicament in the first place :-)

“By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity, we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.”

-Alan Watts

Though in essence I am diving headfirst into the same void of uncertainty that awaited me when I flew to Istanbul a month ago to make one last effort to save a soul mate from slipping away forever, I am reluctantly beginning to surrender to the increasingly undeniable truth that the only choices which can lead me to having a quality of life which I desire are typically not going to be choices that I particularly look forward to making. However, at 25 I have had enough experiences to recognize that my resistance to these situations is actually one of the most accurate indicators of where I should go in my life. The logic is quite simple:

IF I am not content with my life AND I feel a desire to grow, THEN change must occur BECAUSE growth is just a particular subset of the concept of change. THEREFORE, it holds that moments of resistance necessarily precede, in the Universal order of operations, opportunities for growth and are in a way the Universe’s signal to me to

“go down that path, it leads to the next step in becoming who you already are.”

“Are you kidding me?? That is a pitch black vacuum with warning signs and chalk outlines?!? You’re telling me to go in there?!?”

“Not in there, you tiny little being, through there! Just trust.”

“BUT…….okay…….okay, I’ll do it.”

"You can’t go over it

Can’t go under it

Can’t go around it

Gotta go through it."

-  'Going on a Bear Hunt' children's song

So this is me saying fuck it, I've got to at least try! Ask your self what you would do if you woke up one day and suddenly realized that this story had become your own reality? Could you even imagine? Can you help me on my journey? Will you?

This is a photograph from the Istanbul airport just before leaving to return to the US in September.

I can not tell you how badly I wish for this to be last time I must say goodbye to my Beloved.

“Fuck pain, fuck heartbreak, I'm still in love with life.”

- Daniele Bolelli

If you happen to feel moved to contact me, feel free to leave something in the comments section below, or message me privately via

Email: jared.t.kimball@gmail.com
Twitter: JaredKimballMSC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jared.kimball.359

With wishes for you all of peace, love, and a respite from your own suffering,
Jared