My local post office has a very small parking lot and when it's full, cars line up at the entrance to the driveway waiting turns. A few weeks ago, I was the first in line. Suddenly, the car in back of me swung round me and jumped into the lot. I couldn't believe it. I honked my horn and the man driving the other car gave me a dirty look. I just shook my head. It happened that two spaces quickly opened and both he and I parked. When I got out and without thinking I said, "How could you do that?" He was very angry. "You were blocking the entrance," he said, and I heard violence in his voice. "You knew very well that was the line," I said, and left him muttering behind me. I was surprised at how calm I was in this confrontation. I wasn't afraid. I dropped packages off in the lobby and he went inside and that was the last I saw of him. I drove away congratulating myself for my calmness - well, I thought, I've certainly come a long way to be so detached.
But this encounter has stayed with me in a form that is familiar. What I feel when I think of him is regret, the regret that I didn't think fast enough to say the devastating thing to him. For instance, "If you didn't realize that was the line, maybe you shouldn't be driving at all." Not exactly devastating, I can see, but nonetheless it's what goes through my head. Now, weeks later, that line is what's left of the experience. It comes to me at odd times when I'm driving; I find myself almost compulsively repeating the words I wish I'd said.
Even now, thinking about my saying those words, I feel a distinct tightening in my chest, something sharp and intense, vibrating. I recognize it - it's what I feel when I'm defending my ego. When I'm trying to get my own back, come out on top, cut the other person down to size. Hurts, disagreements, feeling discounted, anything I feel as a lack of acknowledgement and appreciation can set off this search for the perfect retort, and it stays with me, gets repeated long after whatever set it off has pretty much faded. There are many other examples of this happening to me over the years. An odd line from something well in the past will suddenly pop into my head and, as I repeat and rehash it, I feel the same body clench as if it happened yesterday.
As I I think about it now, I realize that the inciting incident, the perfect words I think of later - those are interchangeable. They're just the match that lights the flame of ego defense and every once in a while I need to light that flame. I'm a junkie for the feeling defensiveness and the desire for retaliation give me. Incidents change, words are different - but the feeling is the same. It's sharp and intense; it gets my motor running and makes me feel alive.
But I've learned a lot about what resentment and ego cost me and I'm certain I don't want to pay the price. So I've learned a bit about how to surrender, how to let go of the need to be right. I can practice how to cultivate compassion, to look for the humanity in whomever I face. But like almost everyone else, I'm still caught from time to time. Less than I was, but still...
Someone once said that writing is rewriting. It occurs to me that living is reliving. We want to go back and revise, to arrange and rearrange the past so it conforms to our ideas of ourselves, makes us the star of any incident, allows us to come out on top. Who knows - maybe if I say the words I wish I'd said to the man in the parking lot enough, I'll come to believe I did in fact say them. Revision of the past will become only the past and each time I remember those words, I'll feel good about myself for saying them. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
I was talking to a friend of mine who inherited a lot of money years ago. Everyone urged her to buy a house but she just couldn't do it. It seemed beyond her, to have to take care of all that maintenance, to have all that responsibility. She knew home-owning would fill her with too much anxiety so, even though people told her again and again she was making a mistake and should invest, she couldn't bring herself to do it.
We've talked about this many times. She knows it actually was a mistake, that if she had bought a house and handled the money more wisely, she'd have something substantial to leave to her children. But she sees very clearly who she was at the time and that person couldn't do anything but what she did. She's not the same person now and if the money came today she'd find a way to take on the responsibility she ran from those years ago. But given who she was then, it's hard to see how she could have acted differently.
I, like most people, have many things in my past I wish I had done differently. There are all the opportunities I walked away from, the countless things I misunderstood, the long long time it's taken for me to know any part of who I am. But like my friend I too see clearly how it was that I did what I did. I see who I was at the time and how, given the information I had, I couldn't do anything else.
Is it right to say my friend and I have regrets?. The dictionary defines regret as a feeling of sadness or disappointment about something you did or didn't do. Remorse, sorrow, contrition are some of the synonyms. I don't think either one of us feels any of those things. For myself, I can see that my life would be different if I had made different turns but I look back on the girl I was, the young woman so often stumbling around in the dark, and .I feel nothing but compassion for her. No one knows better than I the fear and confusion she lived in and the desperate efforts she made to deny it and never let it show. I understand, I want to say to her, I understand completely.
That compassion has been a long time coming. I remember vividly the long times, whole eras when I was drowning in bitterness and resentment, and punished myself for everything I thought I did wrong. I remember the hopelessness I felt about anything ever turning out right. But somewhere along the line I began to understand that I felt those things because I was focused on only one aspect of my life, the aspect that's all about getting and spending, about looking for my reflection in the world outside. I didn't know that something else was also at work, that the pain I was lost in would lead me to a path I didn't even know was there, the one that would take me toward self-acceptance, compassion, forgiveness - toward getting free. All the time I was looking in one direction, I was being turned in another. I had no way of knowing that this deeper part of me would lead me back to the young woman I had been and show me how to love her.
Isolation is one of my default settings. I distinguish between that and solitude - solitude is the alone time everyone needs - to reflect, create, calm down. My isolation is of another order - it's the thing that makes it hard for me to get out the door or initiate plans with people and stay in touch with them even when I want to. It's what keeps me invisible - lets me be invisible. It's a feeling that descends on me as soon as I turn away from people, away from the world.
There's no point outlining the anatomy of my urge, need, compulsion to isolate. I know enough about it; I want to know how to change. Powerlessness is one way in. Not the kind of powerlessness that's an admission of defeat, or enslavement or in fact anything negative. My admission of powerlessness is an opening. It allows me to take my white-knuckled hands off the frantic need to figure things out and change myself in an instant. There is no kindness to myself in that and it doesn't help in any case. Change doesn't come when the knives are out.
The powerlessness I mean creates a enough space so that I can take a deep breath and relax into the moment, this moment. Willfulness, the endless jockeying of my mind looking for a sense of control - all that dissolves and I feel myself expand. That's where the kindness is, the compassion. Without the calm that comes when I allow myself to feel that kindness, there's no chance at all that anything will change.
There are many risks that I have a hard time taking. They're mostly internal and involve making myself visible in some way - doing my work and sending it out in the world, going to a big party alone. There are others but they all raise up in me a resistance because I don't want to be evaluated - because I automatically assume I will be found wanting.
I've waged many battles with my resistance and the default certainty of rejection. I've learned all about them, their psychogenesis, their repercussions. I know what resistance feels like in my body and I know to shake hands with the negative voices in my head and then act despite them.
But it's one of the mysteries of my life that I can know the symptoms and what I should do to overcome them, and still not be able to do it. You don't want to go out? Well, that's the resistance - just work past it. Those voices in your head? You know they're ephemeral, thoughts just passing through, with no importance other than what you give them. Act despite them! Other people have the same fears and negativity but they act anyway. Why not you? Get a grip!
My resistance to change and taking a risk by walking fully into the world isn't a solid wall stopping me. It's amorphous, viscous, a thick swamp to slog my way though. Many times I make it, but sometimes I don't and, when I don't, I can feel the depression that is more powerful than my desire to act. And I can feel the depression deepening because one more time I have failed myself.
There is hope. I can't think my way past my resistance but I can acknowledge that I'm powerless over it. I can stop fighting to figure things out. I can let myself see the truth, that resistance and negativity have no solid reality. They are only products of my insecure ego. I can focus on the moment and reach for that field beyond my ego where stillness silences my mind. Above all, I can let compassion come flooding in, hold myself gently, and feel love for all my struggles, for my very human desire to be better, to do better, to free myself from all the obstacles I put in my own way. And I can fully embrace the fact that I will have to make this struggle again and again. Each time I do, I will be a little stronger, more able to push past the things that block me.
I choose to believe that is the truth for me. I choose to believe my faith in that truth will make it so.
I was once talking to someone who said she was too much of a perfectionist. Well, I thought, I'll never have that problem - I mess up whatever I try to do, don't follow through, always disappoint myself - I don't try to do something perfectly because I know I never will.
I knew there was a voice, a presence in my head that I came to think of as the Nazi with a whip. This voice said nothing I did was ever good enough. You're not good enough, the voice said again and again, like a diabolical mantra. It was a long time before I realized that was the voice of perfectionism, the demand I put on myself to meet some impossible standard, impossible so I was destined always to fail. Of course, there actually were things I messed up or did halfway but that wasn't the point. No matter how well I did, it would never be enough.
The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, is known for his phrase, "the good enough mother." A mother doesn't have to be perfect to give her child a true self, one that is alive, spontaneous and unafraid. She just has to pay enough attention, be loving and encouraging enough and all the other things that help develop self-love in her child. She just has to be good enough. I've made that a new and productive mantra - I just have to be good enough. That doesn't mean that I don't want to excel, to succeed, even to stand out. It simply takes off the pressure for perfection, and that frees up more energy to actually make my best effort.
And here's something else: as my demand that I be perfect slowly lessened its grip on me, my demand that you be perfect also fell away. As I developed compassion for my beleaguered self, I became more able to look out at the world, to see the struggles everyone else was dealing with. And in seeing it, I began to develop compassion for you and you and you...
I was daydreaming this afternoon, not really thinking about anything. Slowly things intensified - the room around me, my sense of being - and then I was simply flooded with love for the world. Everything was rich, fluid, and I was connected to everything, all that is, but something more, connected to a world of endless possibility. My body and my spirit reached out to embrace it; I felt myself open to whatever the mystery is at the heart of the world. No fear. No concepts and ideas. Only the expanding universe of love.
When the feeling faded, I was left thinking about compassion, and how when we feel it we are opening up our love for the world. To feel the pain of another's struggles, to reach out with kindness, to want to help, to say, I hear you - there's selflessness in that.The focus shifts outward, we are giving out the best part of ourselves and that's when love can come flooding in.
I know I can't will myself into moments like I had this afternoon. What I can do is prepare the way so that those gorgeous feelings can come again. I can set an intention, to be alert to others, to listen and empathize, to acknowledge the kindness of others, to notice the beauty in the world around me. It's one of great paradoxes of the spirit that turning attention outward is so often the way to feel in yourself that brimming over of love.
