I was stopped at a traffic light at an intersection I've passed through a thousand times over the years. I look ed across the street and realized that the shop on the opposite corner had changed hands once more. I remember when it was a flower shop owned by a man who sang opera, followed by a vintage clothing store, followed by two or three businesses that didn't last long. Now I saw it had been updated in a very snazzy style and although I couldn't tell just what was inside, I knew it had to be something very trendy.
The light changed and I drove on thinking about the visual overlay of the streets of my city I carry with me, a stack of acetate sheets my memory lifts to reveal what came before. There is much more to the overlay than I have seen; change went on before my time and will continue after. But there is something very moving for me in stepping back to see the various iterations, the slowly evolving change. It connects me to the deep flowing river of experience that washes over us all.
This set me thinking about my own slow evolution, the way I got from there to here. I can see the whole arc, the many eras - when I was in school or was married or lived in New York or... Like everyone else, I carry a sense of continuity, a continuous consciousness (which William James called "the stream of consciousness") so that my sense of myself remains constant. I always know that I am me. But I can't snatch a single isolated moment of this "me" - it's gone even as I reach for it.
Still, I know I have a story. It's the narrative of all the steps taken and not taken, of choices that were productive and others which weren't, of things remembered and forgotten, of love given and withheld and received - all of it teaching me lessons when I'm ready for them, the lessons of change.
I am the process of evolution and I'm also an organic whole, without tears or disjunctions. Past, present, future; the whole of me arises from moment to moment, created by flux, anchored in change.
I'm compulsively on time. In fact, if I'm not ten minutes early, I feel that I'm late. Time is my tyrant with all the earmarks of compulsion - the sense of something driving me, an anxious motor, its low vibrations quickening my pulse rate. I don't know why I'm like this but I can say, given all the time I spend waiting for other people, if I have to have a compulsion about time I'd much rather it was for being late. The idea of other people waiting for me is an unexpectedly pleasant possibility.
Actually, there's another kind of waiting I think about more. It's the waiting that comes out of magical thinking. Something will happen and I'll be changed - I'll put out a piece of work and its reception will change my life. I'll get this or that or meet someone. and everything will be different. I may as well say I'll win the lottery.
It's the kind of waiting that flies under my radar, so much a part of me I don't even notice it. I don't notice what it tells me: it's all right to be passive, I don't have to push past my resistance to discipline, I don't have to get up and do anything at all. Waiting's voice isn't as loud as it used to be - I've pushed past many of the things that blocked me - but on days when I don't feel like doing anything, and then don't, those days when I let things slide, I know the voice hasn't died away. I'm sure it will follow me into my grave.
It isn't easy noticing core issues, the ones that travel through as silently and invisibly as the blood travelling through my veins. But sometimes, I take a step back, not planning it, and I have a moment of clarity. I see what has been circulating inside;it comes up to consciousness and I can put it into words. That's the beginning of all great change, bringing into consciousness just what has been holding me back. Once I see it, I can move it around, look at it from different angles, and make out its anatomy. I can study how it works in me. I can shake hands with it, no longer in denial, or fear of what will arise, or the obliviousness that comes so easily. And I can surrender to time, acknowledge there are certain issues I will deal with again and again. But I know I will make progress and that's what matters - the sense that I'm heading in the right direction. A momentum starts to build, an appetite for working at change. There is so much hope in that energy, and it's hope that leads me on.
I went shopping very early this morning at a local flea market. I was looking for vintage photos and paper items, and other things that catch my eye. I've been doing it for a long time and by now I know a great many people - serious collectors, shoppers and sellers. Some people I know well enough to stop and chat about our latest finds; with others it's enough to smile or wave in passing. This morning I felt what I always feel - completely at home in that world, connected to so many people, part of a real community.
That's not the only world I move through. There are at least half a dozen others. I've felt uncomfortable in some of them - tongue-tied, intimidated, and defensively arrogant. But that doesn't happen so much anymore. Most of time I'm fully myself no matter where I am. I used to judge and fear that I was being judged. I stood in a circle of friendly people and felt completely alone. There was a veil between me and the rest of the world, an opaque scrim that kept me focused on my lack of connection.
But somewhere along the line things changed. I gave up expectations - of being liked or disliked, admired or not, noticed or not, of anything in particular. Slowly, my facade dissolved. I became myself with no shadows, no hanging back, no assessing myself and the world. I became comfortable in my own skin.
I didn't do this myself, at least not consciously. I could never have seen so clearly what I needed to surrender and then simply gone ahead and done it. Instead, life has gone along, brought me its problems, disappointments, mistakes and in trying to process those a general equanimity has come almost as a byproduct of dealing with one thing at a time. I used to want the big picture to change in a flash of magic but that desire for magic only got in my way. But taking my life problem by problem, sometimes focused so narrowly it was obsession, I began to see the lessons in each problem and how I processed it. I began to feel the continuity of the struggle to get free, the ideas at the heart of whatever individual thing I was dealing with. Eventually, those ideas pushed to the surface, began to arch over all of my "issues" and problems, and slowly became the context of everything in my life.
That's the reason I've become comfortable in my skin, no longer afraid (most of the time) to meet the world on the world's terms. My willingness to do what I can to get free, my quest to find a refuge inside me that I can always count on, my nurturing humility and gratitude, slowly changed me on a level I didn't even know existed in me. I didn't do all that easily, without resistance, but I did it as much as I could on most any given day. All the time I was kicking and screaming, locked into my own ideas of what I needed, something else was taking over, floating me up and putting me down in a place I want to be.
