Being Gay, Living Well
By Cecil Charles Maxfield
So the question comes to me: "What does it mean to you as a gay man to 'be well'?". Not an easy one to answer, so let me just pick this question apart a bit and say some of what strikes me as most important in my life in contributing to my sense of "being well". I can't promise that it's what is important to me as a gay man, but since I live in a gay man's body, some of what I have to say has to come from that perspective. Go figure.
I have learned that my being gay, and attending to all of its concurrent vagaries and joys, is a spiritual journey. So, a large part of what being well means to me is that I attend to my spirit, my interior life. How do I do this? Every person's answer to that question will be unique; mine is this: I do it by trying to achieve the balance between busy-ness and quiet time, the balance between contact with others and time spent alone, and the balance between obligations to the world at-large and obligations to my Self. I am pretty aware of when things seem out of balance for me and what I need to do to re-establish a sense of balance to my life, to re-establish a sense of well-being. My first inclination, on realizing that things are out of balance, is to get out in to the natural world--to take a walk, a hike, a bicycle ride, rollerblade--anything to get me reconnected with the source of my energy, the Earth. These are times when I can reflect on what is going on in my life, try to determine what caused the imbalance in my life and what, if anything, I can do to restore the balance. The ability to have reflective time figures large in my sense of well-being. In a world which increasingly bombards us with media messages to do and be something of someone else's creation, it can be a struggle to find and attend to one's own voice within, so having the ability to silence those sources and "listen in" becomes a valuable tool in the toolkit of life.
As a gay man, I am critically aware of the fact that we still live in a largely homophobic and heterosexist society, and it is a world which can devalue me (yes, we have come a long way in the 20 years since I first came out, but we have quite a way to go, too...), so my sense of well-being is impacted by that fact. Probably the single most important guard that I have against those subtle and insidious judgments of our society is the love and caring of my friends, both straight and gay. The cultivation of true friends who understand, value, and affirm my journey cannot be underestimated when speaking of well-being. Just a few of the things which these friends bring to me are laughter, inclusion in their lives (from marrying, to having babies, to dealing with cancer, to dealing with failing and aging parents, to the loss of a partner and everything in between), understanding, a shared outrage at the injustices of life, and a sense of the wonder of it all.
What else figures in to a sense of being well for me? A short list includes: an ability to laugh often and fully, a desire to subscribe to causes and do something about the injustice in the world, an ability to grow and nurture living things from babies to begonias to bunnies, a desire to play with wild abandon, to write, sing, read, listen to music which brings tears to my eyes, to walk the same route every day for a month and realize that something changes along that route every day, and an unending desire to continue to open to the fact that we live in the midst of a miracle.
All of this and more are what help to define "being well" for me as a gay man. I often fall down in trying to practice all of it, but I know this: it's good work.
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