A FINE LINE

I was talking to a friend this morning. She feels she isn't doing enough to find a job, not sending out enough resumes, or making enough calls. Well, I said, sometimes you actually aren't doing enough, but other times you're too much on your case. It's a fine line.
     I thought about all the times I've teetered on that line. Usually, like my friend, the line is between: am I doing enough or do I have unrealistic goals and am''''' too much on my case? I can be doing something important to me, like writing, or something I wish I never had to do, like vacuuming, or just about anything at all, and I often get the feeling that the writing isn't deep enough or the vacuuming not complete enough. Is that right, or am I suffering from a perverse perfectionism, the kind that tells me everything I do falls short of some imagined, abstract standard buried deep inside.
     There are other times when I teeter on the line because I have a decision to make. Should I walk away from this man because we've gone past the point of no return, or should I stay and try to work things out? Would it be better to leave this town where things never quite work out, or stay and try harder? My busy worried mind can come up with reasons for either side. So I remain teetering, caught by ambivalence in an anxiety of doubt. 
     And this despite my knowing by now that the problem isn't so much the relative merits on each side of the line - although they're important, too - it's ambivalence itself, a very old pattern, almost my default position. I learned to doubt myself as a child and that doubt has carried forward and still undermines the adult I am. It's the issue behind the issue. And I know my ego can convince me of anything, and then a moment later the reverse. I know that desire, self-interest and willfulness all cloud my view. It's easy to blame them, because I know they are very real, but knowing all that doesn't stop me from choosing one thing and quickly thinking the other is what I should really do. I teeter on the line. 
     What will help me act despite my ambivalence? What will give me the courage to get off the fine line. Many insights about my ego, fear and doubt have helped me chip away at. But there's something else. Actual change comes when I go deep inside, as deep as the ambivalence is. I have to sit with it, feel it and embrace it. I have to surrender my guilt that I have it, my despair that I can really change. The only way I've found to do that is to get quiet and try to clear my mind. To meditate. All through the day, I can take deep breaths and feel the expansiveness a clear mind brings. Eventually, I see that one side of the fine line emerges as the one I want to choose. I find the courage to act because experience has taught me that there aren't any mistakes, the kind that I thought would doom me or plunge me into the abyss. There is only what I do and choose, and if it doesn't work out disaster wont' come because I know there is a refuge inside me that will never let me down.
     My ambivalence used to be a giant ball filling the sky but step by step I've brought it down to size until it's so small I can put it in my pocket, look forward and walk on. 
     

ENVY AND SELF-PITY

My mother was an envious woman. I can see her face as she looked at another woman's clothes or diamond ring or larger house - she raised her chin and took quick glances and shifted her shoulders as if she was puffing herself up. It was a look I recognized all through my childhood; I knew even when I was very young that she was measuring what she had against what she saw and she always wanted more.
     It took me a long time to realize how much of her envy I had absorbed. It took me so long because I knew envy was an ugly emotion and I didn't want to have it. But I did. I envied people who had more success than me, were better looking, more flamboyant, all those who seemed to glide through the world with ease and were recognized as special -- all those who had what I wanted and I wanted everything.  
     Once I admitted I was often envious, I began to recognize a certain feeling in my body, the place that got activated when envy claimed me. A sudden twist in my belly, a rawness in my throat, and other signs - when I felt them I could focus on them, focus on envy on the level of the body, and practice easing tension wherever it gathered. I began to understand that envy, like so many of the other feelings that made me suffer, was ephemeral, insubstantial and I didn't have to take it on.
     The biggest realization for me was how close envy is to self-pity. When I looked at how much everyone else had, I felt sorry for myself, who didn't have something someone else did. They had this and that and this, I didn't and never would. It was the "never would" that left me undone - not through anxiety or doubt - but through feeling sorry for myself. I can remember so many times I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, working my way along the edges of a moebius strip of everyone has but I don't. There must be a fatal flaw in me that puts me in and keeps me in the muck. Poor girl, it will never change, you're not strong enough to change it. Poor poor girl. In fact nothing could change as long as I felt sorry for myself. There's nowhere to go with self-pity; it's a retreat from action and hope and any thought of change. 
     As I go along, I feel less and less envy. I've learned there isn't a finite amount of success or any of the good things in life. Other people's having takes nothing away from me. The world is an abundant place and there's more than enough to go round. I've also seen how worthless it is to compare myself and my life to anyone else. Given who I am, if I'm comparing, I'm finding myself less than, and that's become something I can't afford.
     Self-pity is more of a struggle. It works in subtle ways inside me and is often in disguise. I'll be cleaning the kitchen counters and suddenly think about kitchen counters I've seen in a magazine - so much newer and better than mine. I don't have to go further with the thought, but I know what it is, a prelude to self-pity. Kitchen counters may seem like a ridiculous example, but as I move through the day I carry with me all the patterns and habits of my negative mind. They're in the small and the large things, so present I don't even notice them, don't latch on to any one of them. They're simply the air I breathe. But now that I know I have them, I more often do come awake, notice envy or self-pity or any of the thoughts and emotions that hold me back, and try to put space between me and them. I can create the space because there are so many levels to consciousness that I can be my mind observing my mind. That space is where change happens. Nothing goes all at once but every letting go brings the things I want to change further down to size.
     I used to think that allowing myself to see that I suffered from things like envy or self-pity would destroy me. But the opposite has turned out to be true. Freedom comes with insight and insight comes with having the courage to look.
      

YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME

Rejection used to make me shrivel. If some work of mine wasn't wanted, it was entirely possible I would quit working for months. Sometimes, I would bring rejection on myself - in wanting to impress certain people, I would be hyper, aggressive and take up too much room which of course put them off. The memory of trying too hard feels humiliating. Rejection and humiliation are a deadly combination.
     I'm so much better dealing with both than I used to be. When someone I like doesn't like me, I no longer take it as a verdict on my worth. That's just the way it is. It turns out phrases like, "you win some, you lose some," have deep, even profound meanings, which of course is why they become cliches. Learning not to take it personally, knowing that I can let go of bad feelings very soon after they start, understanding that I always have the freedom to choose my own attitude - all of that only slowly became possible for me. Infiltration feels like the right word - the small steps toward freedom infiltrated the black lagoon inside me, little soldiers that embedded themselves in my consciousness until there were so many, they could take over. Consciousness is porous and with experience and insight we can be changed. 
     I think of Alice in Wonderland stepping through the looking glass. She takes a step across the backbone of reality and while she stays the same everything is different. With me, it takes a long line of little steps, working their changes without my realizing it, and then one step comes along and tips me over into what feels like a new reality. My thoughts and feelings, my attitude toward the world and everything in it, is different. I have something like equanimity.
     I wish I hadn't wasted so much time and energy on feeling rejected and humiliated.  But that's wishing I was someone else with some other, fantastically smooth path. Everyone has "stuff" they have to work out; mine is just that, mine. On good days, I'm grateful to have had to struggle toward freedom in my own particular way. And even more grateful to see how far I've come.

PERCHINGS AND FLIGHTS

I have a story I tell myself.  It's the story of myself, the one on which I build my identity. "I'm the on who...." and "this is who I am, that is who I am. These are my beliefs, this is the group I belong to, I never....I always..." It seems silly to say, "Isn't amazing that I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning I know who I am?" But it is amazing, that from moment to moment, I carry forward everything I mean when I say "me." William James described what he called the stream of consciousness, the internal continuity of "me-ness."  He uses a wonderful metaphor of birds both in flight and perching - our conscious thoughts are the perchings but the flights, the connections, are always there, not rising to be known, but running beneath and unifying all that we mean by "self." "I" am the stream with all its eddies and whirlpools and still surfaces, always in the flow.
     It also sounds silly to say how amazed I am that I can have a new idea; I can revise and redefine who I feel I was and who I feel I am now and who I think I'll be in the future.  I can learn something new about myself, see things in a different way, have a lifetime of epiphanies. I am able to reflect on myself - I can change my mind.  That ability is the glory of consciousness, that ideas and opinions aren't set in stone but are part of the great stream that is always changing, never the same stream twice - such a simple thing, that I can come to see things differently.
     I know why I remind myself of all this.  This view of my reality tells me I can change, that I can bind up all the fragments and shards inside that I don't understand, and come to feel myself whole, brimming with energy from that stream, constantly moving, reveling in the flow.
     I need to keep reminding myself of the possibility of change. All of it ephemeral and also a solid rock to stand on.