Subject: Dante/Inferno/I-1

From: Frederick Zimmerman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 15:41:27 -0500

Exercise 1: Where do you think you are in your life's spiritual 
journey?

a) how far along are you?
b) do you know where you are going?
c)  do you ever feel lost?

a)  Chronologically, I'm midway.  I'll be 35 in March.  But I
feel young.   (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I
still  feel like a child.)  I don't feel that I'm close to
halfway along my spiritual journey.

In a way, it feels like I didn't even get started until my
mid-twenties, after the trauma of my parents' divorce and my
breakdown at USC.   Until then, I was totally clueless.  Looking
back, it's as if I was composed of a bunch of separate pieces
that didn't talk to each other.  When I hit bottom, I became
aware at least that there were a lot of separate pieces and that
some of them were very, very unhappy.  Then as I pieced myself
together over the next few years, and especially after I
married, I began to put the pieces together in a functioning
whole.  But it still feels as if there are a lot of damaged,
broken pieces inside of me side-by-side, on an equal footing,
with the healthy, loving pieces.

b) I'm not sure I know where I'm going.  Sometimes--a lot of
times--I have a fairly clear vision of who I want to be.  Other
times, I'm far away from that goal.   I want to be a kind,
caring,  effective, *integrated* person.

Where am I going in reality? Half the time I'm heading towards
being a narrow, wound-up, self-absorbed workaholic.  A
substantial fraction of the time, my mind is absorbed in anxiety and 
anger.

c) Do I ever feel lost?  Hell, yes.  Very often I feel not only
that I don't know where I'm going, but that I'm in a wasteland 
But I think I get that feeling less than I ever did before.

In fact, I just noticed (for the first time) that I've quietly
become much more secure at work.  A year or two ago a dominant
theme of my therapy was the intense, almost crippling waves of
anxiety that I experienced at work.  I just looked inside and
realized that as a result of a variety of changes at work, most
of which I engineered in one fashion or another, I haven't felt
that degree of anxiety for a long time--months.  That's really
good news.

I still get that lost feeling--but now it's confined to two or
three major areas: my sexuality; the temper tantrums that I
still throw; and my relationship with my mom and dad.  Those, of
course, are the big, terrifying areas, the ones that I'm scared
to look at.