Welcome to the place of wisdom

For most of my life, I understood sexual energy in the most obvious way. You are attracted to someone, the body responds, desire appears, and naturally the mind begins constructing a story around the person who seems to have caused it. I want him. I miss him. I need him. There is chemistry between us. Something should happen. We are remarkably quick to turn a sensation inside our own body into a conclusion about another human being.

I have been thinking about integration since I came home from Cambodia, and I am beginning to suspect that I misunderstood the word. We hear this word "integration" everywhere. Only now I can see it clearly.

For a long time, I thought I had difficulty receiving.

I used to think I understood my relationship with control fairly well. I know its obvious forms: planning, preparing, anticipating what can go wrong, wanting enough information before making a decision, taking responsibility, organizing people and circumstances, trying to influence an outcome. I have spent much of my professional life in privacy, compliance and risk, so some of this is not pathology. It is literally part of my job to ask what might happen before it happens, identify what can be controlled, and build structures around uncertainty.

There is something I began to notice in Cambodia that has become so obvious and it stayed with me more persistently than many of the extraordinary things that happened there. My mind was wrong surprisingly often.