Following on from the last post, which on re-reading I realise I left a little bit in the air, I've been thinking about attachment. I'm not sure where to start as I have thoughts swarming through my head so I'll start out with something fairly simple. 
Why would I carry an attachment to a lousy ex who gave me no love for years, put me down and took me apart, who reduced me to nothing, a man whose moods I so feared that if the sun failed to shine and I was due to see him my heart would race because I knew he'd be in a filthy temper and would destroy me as soon as he could. He was never violent, didn't shout or rage, for that I am thankful, but he had a cruel tongue and his silences were dark and freezing cold, I do not imagine I was the first or last of his girlfriends to feel the knife of his ill humour administered with care where it would do most damage. So why hold on to that ? He set me free, he let me go. I should just be grateful. 
I am grateful, but also sad. Because it wasn't always so nasty, of course it wasn't. When we met, as I have written over and over again, it was beautiful, a dream come true, I thought "this handsome man wants me". In hindsight I can see warning signs, but who pays attention to those things when a lover is more often than not wearing their best clothes, bringing flowers, throwing out compliments, when days together are spent in hazy bliss, held hands and I-love-you's.
Those good times created a deep attachment. When a relationship comes to an end there's a certain amount of relief, even if it is also a crushing blow, because the chances are if it has ended that things were not really right and that one or both parties were not wholly there. With Jon, for instance, it was fantastic not to have to worry about the sun not shining any more (see above). I mean there was never anything I could have done about the sun not shining but I sure as hell knew it'd be me getting it because he was fed up about the weather. While we were together I'd learned how to jiggle around him, I'd taken to avoiding him when he would definitely be unkind, a week or so either side of him seeing his daughter he would be pure poison. It was nice not to have to work around that. 
But I was nostalgic for our good times, the miles and miles of walking we did together, in Yorkshire, Devon, Cornwall, Kent, Wales, Italy and Shropshire, as well as Norfolk and Suffolk our home territory. 
And I missed the ordinariness of our lives, eating tea on the sofa on a Saturday evening watching tv with him - rugby or Doctor Who or whatever was least awful, waking up together and making love. I missed the omelette and fried potatoes he'd cook me for breakfast if he was happy. I missed having sex with him. Forgive me, too much information. 
But those things are attachments. When he left he was familiar. I knew him. I knew how to move around him. It is true he could make things nasty but if you love someone enough you find a way round their foibles. We are all flawed. He wasn't perfect, I wasn't perfect, we weren't perfect, but for me, at that point, I still wanted to share my time with him. My desire to stay with him was vain and selfish I see in retrospect. I had an idea of who we might be together I think, and clearly he did not share the picture I had drawn in my head because he wanted out. 
This I think is where attachment and love get a bit tangled up; did I love him ? or did I love a him I wanted him to be ? Do other people do that too, decide how things should be and then when things turn out differently, struggle to adapt to a reality which can compare badly at first glance with disney-fantasy-land we had in our minds as the ideal. 
But by the same token reality is more sensual and less ethereal. It's the difference between going to Venice and looking at pictures of Venice. I've never been to Venice, it's one of my fantasies. One day I will, and it will be a fragment of time in my life when I flick through my past. For now it is an imagined fragment, more beautiful, or less beautiful, but not real. Will I go alone or with a companion, a lover or friend. I had told Jon of my longing to go there and he slightly broke the place for me because he went with someone else a year or so after we had split. I think if I go there his ghost may be present in the walls and walkways. But he will be one of many ghosts, and I too will leave my visiting spirit print. 
Ack, Jon again, why am I wittering on about him, I think there is an element of exorcism going on. But that aside, our identity, yes that old chestnut, is wrapped up in our attachments, so when someone, or something has been important to us for a long period of time, or is really just part of our being, it is very hard to let go of that attachment. Attachments can be deleterious but still held tight simply because we are used to them and have become set like rock around them.
It's one of those things, sometimes a person might play a role within a social group - a family maybe, or a friendship circle. Their being that person is part of what holds the group stable. If they seek to change the group may put up quite some resistance to that change because when one changes, it may be that all the other parts/parties may have to change. Some changes are predictable and desirable like kids growing up and leaving home, others less so. Sometimes changes can be quite subtle, a person who always said yes begins to say no. This can be surprising and challenging, and cause some upset to people who are used to assent. 
In my last post, I wrote about when my two oldest children were small, it was a stretch of time which has given me sharp edges. I woke early this morning thinking about it, thinking about why I am so anxious about the imminent uk general election. My anxiety levels are not appropriate to my current situation and so my feeling is that they are a response to the trauma of being abandoned by my family and being a young single parent with two small children, really hanging on the mercy of an unmerciful government and the kindness of strangers. Somehow we got through and it taught me a lot, is in many ways the bedrock of my being and possibly a big thing in my daughters life too tho' I cannot really speak for her. I suppose I could say I am attached to that experience. It is a part of me.
Perhaps attachment to experiences is another thing that creates our identity. In my heart I wish I was a traveller, I'm not, I have only ever lived in Norfolk, to date. I am, to be frank, a little stuck. I think I am ashamed of only having lived in one place. I want to test myself to see how I fare making a new a life, in another place. And yet. And yet I also love my home and am loathe to disturb the peace, my home is my sanctuary, when I go away I am always pleased to come home.  And Norwich is a wonderful place to live, there are great people here, brilliant yoga and dance teachers, a lively arts community, the coast is close and beautiful. I am working out how to make my dreams of travel possible and I am sure I will make it happen presently. But I want to do it gently. Maybe I am living in cloud cuckoo land, maybe travel isn't like that, maybe it is disruptive by nature, a pushing out into new territory. I don't know. I guess when we travel a part of our baggage is our selves. Any way I think that's a digression. But perhaps an important note to myself a setting down of intention.
All the links we make to people, places, things etc become embedded in our being, this place, that place, this book, those shoes, that song, those people ... they are a part of our story. Each one of us is a story. A story that here and there ties up with anther's story and then looses or doesn't. I would say I have had a lucky life really, here and there an upset but in my now I am surely fortunate. When we tell stories about ourselves or other people we are creating a fixed narrative. But shifts and deviation are inevitable, it's the joy of story, it is gorgeously mutable. It is gorgeously mutable but I suppose it's because I work in 3d and because I am fascinated by how time and wear change things I like to make sure I look at things from various angles, up close, and from a distance, and over time. I think history tends to be judge of our lives in the end.