"Well Stephen, the bird's flightless, not going anywhere..."
"A Life Lived In Fear Is A Life Half-lived"
January 15, 2007
Dear Billy,
I hope your holidays were happy and that you’ve made your move to Virginia successfully. I am doing well; my health and mindset are both much improved. I think of you and Barbara often and I hope that both of you are doing well.
I’m writing to first thank you for the years of friendship that we’ve shared. You of course know that you are and have been much more than a friend… I truly have loved you and I care for you still. There will always be a special place in my heart for you.
I often wonder if you have been reading my blog on Yahoo! 360. If so, then what I want to share with you here won’t be much of a surprise. I wanted to write today to tell you about someone very special that I’ve met. His name is Stephen, and he is a wonderful man who in many ways reminds me of you. Like you, he is a warm and caring person who loves me genuinely and who also loves God.
Stephen and I met six months ago and have been seeing each other for the last four months. We both realized immediately that there would be more between us than just friendship… We are very close to one another and very much in love and we have joined our lives together. We were legally married in Canada today.
Stephen is employed in the internal audit field and we’ll soon both be relocating from the Detroit area to his next assignment location, probably somewhere in the south. As you can imagine, I am very deeply in love with Stephen to be willing to so drastically change my life in this way. I am happy and I am thankful that God has brought Stephen and I together.
I am also very thankful that you and I had the time together which we did. You were and still are very precious to me Billy. As you might imagine, having now joined my life to Stephen’s it would be difficult for you and I to continue the friendship that we’ve had. Nevertheless, you’ve been a wonderful friend and it is not lightly that I tell you that I won’t be able to write again. Although I still love you as my friend and I will always pray for your well being, I don’t want to give Stephen any cause to doubt my love and fidelity. Because I know you to be a kind, caring, and generous man, I know you’ll understand this.
I thank you my dear friend, you brought joy to my life and have brought me happiness with every card, letter, message and call since that wonderful and painful summer when we met. Billy, I will never forget you, not ever. I hope you’ll be happy for me and know that if it is the desire of your heart, I hope that you’ll meet that special someone who can bring you the happiness that I’ve found with Stephen.
It is my sincere hope and prayer that you too will find your own pleasant tide of life. Perhaps we will meet again someday and I will have the pleasure of introducing to each other the two men who have truly made me happy and brought me joy. Please pray for Stephen and I and know that God hears your name in my prayers always.
In fond remembrance,
Christopher
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I can remember this day forty years ago quite well... All that week, my father and I, and to a lesser degree my mother, older brothers and my sisters were all following the news of the mankind's greatest exploration -- "The Journey to the Moon."
Some years ago, I wrote about my recollections of July 20, 1969* on the BBC's website. Surprisingly, since then, what I wrote has been widely quoted on other websites and even in an elementary school textbook. Most recently, it was excerpted on the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum blog commemorating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
The moon landing is one of a very few significant events that I can remember from the earliest years of my life... That summer of 1969, my mother was getting me ready to start school in the fall. It was just a few months after starting school, in kindergarten that I would begin my own "great exploration" with the significant discovery that I was gay (although at the time I had no idea what it meant or what to call it).
From the BBC website:
Although I had only recently celebrated my fifth birthday, I have a very vivid memory of that day.
We were all glued to the television at our kitchen table.
My brothers and sister and I were gathered around our parents. I was the smallest boy, so I got the privilege of sitting on Dad's lap.
I remember, my father being very quiet and mindful of what was being described on TV.
Then when Neil Armstrong started down the ladder, I felt a tremor run through my Dad. When he made his famous speech, I felt something wet drop onto the top of my head - I turned to see profuse tears streaming from my father's eyes and rolling over his cheeks.
My father would later say, "Even serving in the war (WWII) paled in comparison." He was never more proud of being an American than on the day our flag flew on the moon.
*Although the Lunar Module touched down at 4:17 P.M. EST on 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong did not depart the spacecraft until about 6 hours later. So in Europe and Africa, the moon walk occurred during the early morning hours of July 21st due to the time difference.
"The Risk of Being Loved..."
In today's excerpt - the risk inherent in positive
emotions: observations from the psychiatrist George
Vaillant, who has long been the chief curator of the
Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the
longest-running - and probably the most
exhaustive - longitudinal studies of mental and
physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a
study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores
(all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70
years:
"As Freud was displaced by biological psychiatry and
cognitive psychology - and the massive data sets and
double-blind trials that became the industry
standard - Vaillant's work risked obsolescence. But in
the late 1990s, a tide called 'positive psychology'
came in, and lifted his boat. Driven by a savvy, brilliant
psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named
Martin Seligman, the movement to create a scientific
study of the good life has spread wildly through
academia and popular culture (dozens of books, a
cover story in Time, attention from Oprah,
etc.).
"Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a
champion of its message that psychology can
improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in
many ways, his role in the movement is as
provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a
lecture to Seligman's graduate students on the power
of positive emotions - awe, love, compassion,
gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or
faith). 'The happiness books say, 'Try happiness.
You'll like it a lot more than misery' - which is perfectly
true,' he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell
psychologists they'd cross the street to avoid
someone who had given them a compliment the
previous day?
"In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us
more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is
that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have
immediate payoffs - protecting us from attack or
attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude
and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper
connections - but in the short term actually put us at
risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to
be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the
common elements of rejection and
heartbreak.
"To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of
his 'prize' [Harvard] Study men, a doctor and
well-loved husband. 'On his 70th birthday,' Vaillant
said, 'when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his
wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to
many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write
a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100
single-spaced, desperately loving letters - often with
pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely
presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to
him.' Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man,
who proudly pulled the box down from his
shelf. 'George, I don't know what you're going to make
of this,' the man said, as he began to cry, 'but I've
never read it.' 'It's very hard,' Vaillant said, 'for most of
us to tolerate being loved.'
Joshua Wolf Shenk, "What Makes Us Happy?" The
Atlantic, June 2009, pp. 47-48.
Isreali Army Maj. Yoni Schoenfeld and Noam, his partner
