He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have -- Socrates
I've been very dissatisfied the last few days. "My life isn't anything like I want it be, anything like what I thought it would be. Why haven't I done more and have more? Why haven't I changed more, learned more - why have I turned out the way I have?" I could go on but you catch my drift.
Satisfaction is an interesting concept. I used to think if I were satisfied, it could only be because I'd given up and surrendered ambition; I thought my desire for more was the only thing that would help me get what I wanted. Contentment, which is one of the definitions of satisfaction, seemed like the kiss of death. I didn't want to be content because it meant that I'd be like a dumb beast in a field, chewing my cud, getting nowhere.
It took me a long time to see that I rejected satisfaction and was afraid of what contentment would mean for me because I was run by a tyrannical ambition and the kind of perfectionism which told me that everything I did wasn't good enough. I was afraid that if I turned away from them, I'd never do anything at all. That both paralyzed me and made it very hard to act for good or ill somehow escaped my notice.
Things only began to change as I slowly understood that the things I thought I needed, like ambition and drive, were the very things that were getting in my way. It's not that those concepts are bad in and of themselves; we'd never get anywhere if we didn't want things and actively pursue them. But in my case, they had a negative effect. That tyrannical ambition meant that my work didn't come first; it stood in the foreground blocking my view of everything but what my work was supposed get me. I was a capitalist of any talent I had, driven to make my talent pay, in attention, admiration and financial reward. When that drive is coupled with a perfectionism that tells you everything you do isn't good enough - well, I was living on the razor's edge and it was a terrible place to be.
Slowly, I gained some insight into all this. It's hard to say why the process of change began but I know a part of it was my realization of the pain I was in. I'd been holding down my fear that I would never accomplish anything that was good enough (good enough for whom was a question I didn't ask.) But it was pain that forced me to consider the possibility that what I thought of myself, who I had to be, what I had to do, was - maybe - the source of my problems. I took a tiny first step - I became willing to change.
I began to see my ambition in a new way and to understand how lacerating my perfectionism was. I slowly became able to find them in my being, to isolate and get some space around them. I worked to bring them down to size. My desire to let them go taught me about surrender.
It's been a very long process. It took time to strip away levels of fear so that I could bear to look at some truths about myself and my thinking. But above all things I wanted to get free. I instinctively knew that I'd never be free enough to do my best work and connect with the world if I wasn't willing to have the knots in me unravel. I wanted another kind of satisfaction and contentment, the kind that comes from the sense of being free.
Well, you can tell from the first sentence of this little essay that I haven't gotten so free that I no longer feel dissatisfied. Some part of me will always want unrealistic things and make me feel I'm falling short. I'm content with that, not in spite of still being susceptible to the things inside me that cause me pain, but because of those things. I now know I'm human and humans have "issues." These are just my issues and I can live with that.
Years ago, in the middle of doing something I can't remember, I suddenly heard a voice: "I want but I can't have." I knew immediately this was a voice from the deepest part of me. Core. One of oldest, perhaps the oldest belief I had about myself. It was shocking - and heartbreaking that I myself, ruled by this idea, was the reason I felt so held back by a force I couldn't understand. I knew had everything I needed to have a successful life - but I couldn't seem to get ahead.
The voice was heartbreaking because I suddenly understood the world or circumstances or luck weren't holding me back. I was the one holding me back. I had been confirming the truth of the voice again and again. I'd been compulsively enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy. I began to understand why I could rarely keep commitments, was always moving from thing to thing and place to place, unable to follow through on opportunities, unable to create the arc of a successful career or maintain a long term relationship.
A hidden part of my subconscious had revealed itself, and it was devastating, to think that all the time I lived under a tyrannical ambition, wanting to (in shorthand) be rich and famous, I was actually living out a very different goal, one that was about impoverishment, frustration and self-denial.
I thought this core belief must have come from childhood but in a sense that didn't matter. Its etiology might be interesting, but I intuitively knew understanding its source wouldn't help me walk out of the prison the voice kept me in. How then could I get free? Was the part of me that wanted to get free, to change, weaker than the voice? How could I transform a fundamental part of my psyche, my very being, so that I was no longer under its dominion? Did I, so used to pessimism about myself, frequently in despair, really think it was even possible?
Over the years, I've learned there are many roads to transformation. No one of them is the only one; all of them are useful, even necessary, for dealing with the negative sentences I pass on myself. I first had to acknowledge the voice inside me; my hearing it at all was a great gift, the first step in seeing the truth inside me. I decided that the part of me that heard the voice was greater than the voice itself. I tried to act out of that decision - even when I doubted I could. Through experience, I learned how to take a step back, put some space around the voice and in that way to begin to bring it down to size. It's been a slow walk to the kind of change I want and it's still going on. I understand now the voice will always be with me but I don't have to believe it.
Most of that slow walk has been on a spiritual path. I learned to meditate and often found images that could help me. I saw a collapsed stick figure, the picture of despair, and I worked for months to get her arms and legs fleshed out, to put color in her cheeks and get her standing. Eventually, I saw her walking out into the world, smiling with her arms open wide. It was powerful and I can still think of that image and feel the possibility of change.
Because of my frequent companions, suffering and despair, I've learned how to surrender to something greater than myself, to the idea that the universe is benevolent and wants me to have a good life. I do what I can to cultivate hope. I try not to impose my will, rush to come up with solutions to all my problems - I've learned that if I concentrate on principles like gratitude and humility, the answers, the right actions, will come to me. The answers aren't the end; my resistance to change is a major obstacle; it's a challenge to take the risk of moving out of my comfort zone. I have to ask the universe to give me the strength to take the actions to make the answers come true.
Does this sound as if the work I've had to do is done? Far from it. There are still many days when I can't connect with hope or gratitude, days when all I hear is the voice, repeating again and again, that I want but can't have. But some crucial things have changed. I used to think the fact that I was so held back by a voice deep inside me meant that there was no hope for me; it confirmed all my hopelessness and fear. But, slowly, slowly, I've learned it's all right to have things inside me I want, need to change. In fact, I've come to understand that dealing with the voice inside me, working to get freer and freer, is the real purpose of my life, the work I'm meant to do. In a paradoxical way, it's the struggle that's put solid ground under me. I'm anchored in the effort to change.
I've come to believe something else as well. If the deepest change is possible for me, it's possible for all of us. Hope, gratitude, humility and the art of surrender will inevitably lead all of us where we want to go.
For more than a year now, I've been eating in a way that's allowed me to lose weight. Day in, day out - not always perfect but good enough. I've kept track of the pound by pound loss and by now I've filled up pages in a little pad I keep near the scale. Every once in a while, I go through the entries, track the slowly declining numbers, July, September, January, July again. It's the record of my commitment, my willingness to keep to a beneficial discipline.
The other day I hit a new low, a significant low, and I felt a rush of deep pleasure, a special combination of amazement that I've done it and the thrill of satisfaction. For a few minutes, I walked around the house feeling delight, holding myself close, wrapped in the wonderful fact of my achievement.
I thought about the day after day gradual peeling away, the process that's been taking place under and through whatever else has been happening in my day or month or year. In the times I've been dragging through the Slough of Despond or been pretty much oblivious to the content of my days - through all the time I've read as disappointing or unproductive or just blah, underneath, behind it all was something positive, something nourishing that I all but ignored.
It's a lesson in focus, on where I choose to put my attention. It's very easy for me to see only the negative or to float away into The Great Blank. I can feel all my internal eyes shifting, darting, not really alighting long enough to take anything in. The internal flow becomes incoherent, chaotic, overflowing with content, holding on to very little meaning.
In this year of continuing commitment, I'm going to take the time to feel hard won satisfaction. It's possible I can even manage to feel proud of myself. Even if I feel like a fool, I'm going to stand in front of a mirror and really take in how much my body has changed. I'm going to take time to think about how I can build on this accomplishment; is there some other good I can do for myself. I don't have to drive myself to find that "other good." In fact, a frenetic search built on self-will is guaranteed to do more harm than good. Better to walk around allowing myself some good feeling which opens the possibility of coming to good ideas...
You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on the affirmative, and don't mess with Mr. In Between.
There are two things that can throw me into a panic: something going wrong with the car and something going wrong with the computer. It's not the oh-my-god-how-can-I-function-without-it sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it's not because I know nothing about them and am therefore dependent on other people who I hope know what they're doing. It isn't even the money it will cost to fix either of them,
I think the panic goes deeper. It's my fear of being without something I need which I can see is a kind of fear of abandonment. I'm a child saying, "Mother, don't take that rattle from me - Mother, don't take yourself from me." I feel bereft, and as I had bad parenting, I learned to cover up whatever I needed so I wouldn't feel the pain of not getting it.
The car and computer are crucial to my daily life and, even though I'm an adult and know whatever the problem is will get fixed and probably sooner rather than later, I find myself feeling resentment at the universe for doing something mean to me, and the powerlessness of a child, and anger at myself for having that reaction in the first place. I know it's irrational and I have ways of quickly moving past the turmoil of those feelings, but the buttons that were installed in childhood will always be there. They've seared pathways in my being, and the feelings they give rise to will surface at the most unexpected times. I've learned that's all right. Those fears and needs have taught me most of what I know about surrender, letting go and the transitory nature of all feeling, both good and bad. Those feelings have taught me how to deal with them.
Today, there is nothing wrong with the car and the computer is working just fine. No need for panic, no need at all.
I was thinking about how personal words are. They're common currency among us all but their meanings, their resonance, is particular to each of us. For instance, I say "surrender" and think freedom, letting go of something that is blocking me, something I cling to, demand, expect. But many other people hear surrender as defeat or resignation, accepting you'll get less than you want, be less than you want to be. The way I understand surrender comes out of direct experience. When I'm rigid, insistent, controlling, surrender - letting go - comes as a relief, a lightening of the rock I've been carrying around with me. To accept things as they are isn't to resign myself; it's to free myself so that I can be free from distortion, free to act not out of ego but with equanimity.
Another word that resonates is for me is "austerity." I know for many people this word means less than should be: tighten your belt, do without, go on an enforced diet. It means bare, without ornamentation. But that's exactly what makes the word significant for me. For some reason I see water dripping on grey stone, zen-like, something very plain and simple. Something without adornment, something pure. Oceanic art, Bauhaus design, Teco pottery - their beauty comes from simplicity. So austerity for me means simplicity. I don't know why a word that suggests a negative for most people is a positive for me.
There are many other words that resonate in me. Humility, gratitude, kindness...No one else can know exactly what I feel when I hear or think of those words. All of my experience, my thinking, my temperament has created certain connotations; they're completely my own, private and even if I wanted to say in detail what I hear, why it resonates, I couldn't. They're unique to me. Personal.
Each of us has certain resonant words, the ones that put us in touch with something very deep inside us. We have many of those words in common; we agree on their meanings in a general way. But we can't know the particulars, the pathways through our being these words travel.
There is a universe inside us, a universe made up of what we inherit from our culture, what we've learned from our experience, our own connotations and random connections that are formed paradoxically in the vast part of that universe that exists in the place beyond words. We never come to the end of ourselves and the more we open ourselves the more the resonances come.
The other day, a friend was talking about telling someone else that she was sorry for something she'd said - making amends. As we talked, I began thinking about humility and the willingness to take responsibility, at how necessary both are to getting free. We live in a culture in which many people are defensive and blame everyone else. Sometimes, I can see them stewing, rehashing all the reasons they are right.. It seems impossible for them admit any wrong-doing and I think this comes out of insecurity. The more threatened the ego, the more it wants to protect itself.
I think of the many times I've said or done something I shouldn't have, gotten angry, tried to get my own back. Something eventually shifted, though, and I began to realize that it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong; what I actually want is to let go of the residue of bad feeling I can so easily drag around with me. I've learned to feel in my body what anger, resentment, the need to prove I'm superior feel like. A motor revs up inside me and takes over, makes me go over and over again whatever the incident or argument was, becomes an obsessive reliving of all the bad feelings I walked away with.
I no longer want those feelings in my body so I've had to cultivate the kind of humility that helps me recognize when I've been wrong or done wrong. It keeps me from leading with ego and from the need to prove anything. It's what make amends possible.
But there's another ingredient in the willingness to make amends. Someone once said that the only way out of guilt is to take responsibility. Guilt imprisons and paralyzes me. Taking responsibility puts me on a new footing; it's as if I've been in a dark cave, endlessly blaming myself, giving myself all the bad feeling that keeps me from change. But I can find the way out, the way past the prison of guilt and that means taking responsibility. Not only for things I've said and done but also for the voices inside that tell me lies of negativity. I want that pathway, the freedom it promises. If it requires owning up to the truth or making amends or surrendering the need to clutch bad feeling to me, I'm more than willing to do it. I just don't want to live in guilt and carry bad feeling forward.
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.
I was meditating this morning, focused on my breathing, when I heard a voice say, "Step out of your fear." I've heard it many times before and always see a circle of low stones, the size of cinder blocks, though made of stone. I see myself step over them and sometimes, when I've repeated, step out of your fear many times, and imagined myself stepping over the stones, fear leaves me and I calm down.
This morning, the stones changed into a doorway with all its symbolic meaning. I imagined myself walking through. But the image wasn't resonating in me. Then I saw a gate, a tall one attached to a fence or walls, a gate that clearly marked one side and the other, under a broad blue sky. I wanted to pass through and know myself in a different place.
I focused on that image for the rest of my meditation. I was looking for something I've felt before, the moment when suddenly there's no barrier between image and me. I've taken it fully into me, or it's taken me. In a sense, the kind of connection I mean is an obliteration, a sudden disappearance of the walls between me and the world, between me and self, and self and object. In short, a mystical experience. It didn't happen today but it's happened before and I'm sure it will again. I know I'll stumble into those moments of exquisite obliteration.
I come back from those moments with the seeds of change. I don't think about it. I don't make up stories around it; I don't think that moment means X, Y, or Z. I move through my days, busy with other things, but underneath, deep below the crust of self-consciousness, those seeds are growing. I don't realize it until one day I find myself doing things differently - writing more, cleaning things up immediately, making commitments and keeping them, not getting angry at the slow driver in front of me. I have more often a feeling of equanimity.
I don't know how it works. In that giving over of self, there is the sense of very deep expansion. Do the molecules in my body expand, reorder themselves, initiate new wiring? I'm not seriously considering that theory, but who knows? Stranger things have turned out to be true. Whatever the mystical moment is, it's the place where change begins, the place where healing at a depth I can't fathom takes root.
There are things I know with my mind and things I know with my body. I want both kinds of learning but for me it's in my body that deep connection comes into being. And sometimes, I who compulsively puts everything into words, want to be silent as I sit with that.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
One night, lying in bed waiting for sleep, it suddenly came to me that whatever else had happened or would happen, I had made the crucial turning, done the work I was meant to do. I had climbed out of the bushes and gotten on the path.
Before that crucial turning, I felt fragmented, full of contradictions, self-loathing and despair that I would ever be able to change. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me but I couldn't see what it was; at the heart of me there was a mystery I'd never solve because I didn't even know what was mysterious.
But I made the crucial turning. I had a spiritual awakening. I discovered something beyond and behind the problems and fears that filled my thinking, about myself and about the world. I'd come to understand certain universal spiritual principles - surrender, detachment, atonement, meditation, ongoing self-examination, service - and slowly those principles became the context of my life. When something bad happened, I asked myself, which one of those principles will help me get free? Do I need to surrender or let go or accept what is; do I need to ask, what is my part? Do I need to take a moment to sit quietly and find the energy of those principles inside me? How can I apply those principles so I can climb the ladder they provide to a higher perspective?
I have many regrets about the past and on most days I wish certain things were different now. I wish the blues and lethargy didn't come around to claim me. I wish my life had more continuity. I wish so many things. But there is a continuity, an unspooling ribbon beneath my feet and it supports every step I take. It's the path, the solid ground of faith in the principles that I've lived with for a very long time. Faith has grown in me because I've experienced time after time the solace and freedom they always give me when I remember to breathe deeply and make the effort to connect with them.
I'm a great procrastinator. Sometimes, I put off things I actually feel I want to do. I want to have a clean house, but I procrastinate about actually cleaning. I want to take those bags of clothes to the Goodwill, but I put off taking them. In fact, I can let them sit under the dining table for weeks. There are many others tasks I can postpone doing and for as long as it takes me to get fed up with what hasn't been done.
When I was in graduate school, I put off writing papers until the last minute. That "until the last minute" is very much a part of procrastinating. But maybe I was ruminating all the time I wasn't writing so by the time I sat down I had a good idea of what I wanted to say. That's putting a kind spin on it, but that might be the right thing to do - procrastination is a prejorative and I have more than enough issues I blame myself for, blame which generally makes it harder for me to do anything about what I'm blaming myself for in the first place.
There's another more subtle procrastination and it has to do with internal change. I want to overcome my habit of zoning out, of wanting only to lie on the bed, watch a video or just stare at the ceiling. I've come to call it a habit because in giving it a name, I bring it down to size and have a realistic chance of change. The only way to do that is to act in spite of my desire to zone out - but I push away, put off facing whatever it is at the heart of my resistance. Holding myself back is an action - not the one I think I want but a willed action nonetheless.
I've spent a very long time trying to get to the reasons I put off even important things and hold myself back from change. Why do I have this resistance? But there's another habit, my repeatedly telling myself I have this resistance and blaming myself for not pushing past it. That's a story I tell myself - I am the one who can't get past my resistance - and it's a habit of mind so ingrained, so huge inside me, I don't register how often I tell myself that story. I think it's reality, my only reality, and I despair of ever changing it.
I spend a lot of time analyzing myself, taking my temperature, trying to put into words what I think is going on inside me. I believe in self-reflection. But trying to understand the reasons for my procrastination hasn't helped me change all that much. But I've come to think of my self-analysis as a distraction. Looking at my procrastination from every angle keeps me entertained while I'm procrastinating. By this time, though, I know there's no magic, no fairy dust that will descend and make it easy for me to hop, skip and jump to act. If I want to get those bags of clothes to the Goodwill, I have to shake hands with my resistance, my habit of procrastination and see that I'm bigger, my being is larger than those two old friends. Then there's hope that I will take my eyes off the ceiling, stand up, drag the bags to the car, put the key in the ignition, shift into drive, and go. There's no help for it. Shift into drive, and go!
Years ago, I was on the cross town bus in New York. I can't remember where I was going - for that matter, I can't remember where I was coming from. The one thing I do remember is at some point looking up, and there standing across the aisle was the most beautiful boy I've ever seen. He had the kind of beauty that compels you to stare and I couldn't look away. He was tall, with rosy cheeks, light eyes, dark hair - I guessed he was fifteen or sixteen. I suddenly thought, he's at the peak of perfection, and he may never be this beautiful again.
Why do I remember him all this time later? I think it was shock that imprinted him on me, the shock of coming upon beauty suddenly, all unaware. The usual things float past on any given day but only a few of them actually register and fewer of them stay with me for very long. But looking up and seeing the boy split the day open. I wanted to drink him in, take him, the sight of him, inside me. I understand now that I did take him inside; his beauty has stayed with me.
A few years ago, I saw a show of photographs by Josef Koudelka. In black and white, there was a series he took of gypsies - musicians, little boys pretending to be musclemen, the small village in which they lived. Other series were landscapes with ancient ruins and portraits and some that were almost abstractions of light and shadow. Many were candid shots of people encountered on the street doing all the ordinary things people do, transformed by Koudelka's eye into time-stopped importance. It's not quite right to call them candids; they're very carefully framed, many with the converging lines of a deep perspective. All of them have a feeling of stillness and space. I thought they were art and they were beautiful, not only the images but the meticulous way they were A. There was a lusciousness to the blacks and that's what drew me. The depth of the blacks, their richness, gave me the sense that no matter how long I looked, I'd never come to their bottom. I couldn't look away.
Over the centuries, philosophers and others have filled the world with words about Beauty. A vast number of people have put out their own versions of Beauty's definitions and standards and aesthetics. I've read some of those words - writing and reading about Beauty is an interesting way to pass the time. You can talk about the Platonic ideal and what Kant and a good many others said about Beauty with a capital B, but those concepts are very far removed from the actual experience of beauty, the interplay between subject and object, of merging with the object, that creates the intense feeling I recognize as beauty. This is what the boy on the bus and the Koudelkas have in common. They gave me the same experience - they pierced me to the bone, stopped me in my tracks, made me unable to look away.
Of course I remember them. Beauty, that intense experience of beauty, turns out to be indelible.
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.
The other day, I was reading about a man who had gotten lost on a hike in the mountains. I was most interested in how long it took him to realize that he was in fact lost. Evidently, we are always making mental maps of where we are - the familiar like your house or the way to your office. When we're in unfamiliar places, we need some time to orient ourselves. We try to construct maps of where we think we are and where we think we're going. The man in the mountains had a image of a lake that should have been up ahead. Even when he could see that the terrain wasn't matching what he knew it should be, he kept thinking the lake was just over the next ridge. He couldn't register where he was and continued to believe he was on his way to where he wanted to go. He rushed ahead trying to get over the next ridge and used up energy, made bad decisions about what he was capable of, ignored the growing danger of being alone in the woods.
He was lost in the mountains for five days and it was only on the fourth that he came fully to realize and to accept that he was lost. He stopped trying to make his surroundings conform to some idea in his head. He began to map out where he was and focus on what he needed to do to survive. Rescue came on the fifth day.
I hardly need pick out the metaphors. Rushing to make reality conform to my own mental maps. Continuing to deny the reality of where I actually am. Using up precious energy in denial. Wanting so much for something to true that I can't see what's in front of me.
In a sense, this is the human condition. Each of us wants what we want and sometimes desperately so. We all are sometimes blinded by our ego wants and needs and can't see beyond them. We can run for a long time before we notice we're not getting any place at all, that in fact we're lost, without a clue about what to do next. Anxiety and dread build because some part of me senses that something is wrong, I'm afraid to be "lost". But it turns out getting lost isn't the worst thing; the worst thing is continuing to insist that I know where I am.
Eventually, the bubble of denial has to burst and then comes the moment of surrender. It's the moment when I accept that I've been holding on to illusions and wasting my energy, my creativity, by insisting on my own distorted version of reality. I open my hand and anxiety and dread dissolve and I feel energy because they are no longer sapping me. I surrender and don't fall into the abyss. Instead, I float free, able to see what is. In that moment of clarity, a path opens up, one that will take me where I want to go. I find a place of refuge inside which is always my home. I can't get lost. I carry my home with me.
I've been thinking about survival again, both physical and psychological. It's impossible to predict who will survive a blizzard on Everest, or being castaway at sea or lost in a forest - any one of so many possibilities for being stranded and possibly hurt. But there are certain traits that all survivors share: an ability to come right into the moment and see the reality of what's happened and what in front of them needs to be done first. Staying calm, even when there's fear and anger. An assumption of responsibility, not looking for someone else to save them or someone to blame. Breaking things down to small, doable tasks. Believing they will succeed at the same time they're ready to accept whatever will happen. Being grateful they're alive. Aware of nature and its beauty.
While these are things that will help you survive accidents and natural disasters, they are also the stuff of psychological survival and spiritual growth. Come into the present. Find a place of refuge inside so you can let go of fear and anger. Take responsibility. Do what you can do on any given day. Open yourself to the beauty of this world. Have faith. Practice acceptance.
It's not surprising that all kinds of survivors have so much in common. No matter what we're facing, it's our hearts and spirits that determine the outcome. The good news is that all of them can be cultivated. We can keep them in mind as we go through the day, and as we go though whatever life brings.
This afternoon, a friend reminded me of the great spiritual principle, "Have no preference." Walk through the world and your life without desiring this or that, labeling good or bad, running away or running toward. Surrender all evaluating and judging. Be only a neutral filter of experience.
I understand no preference as something different from acceptance. Acceptance is what I come to after the fact; it's the step beyond experience when I process what has happened. Inevitably I label it as bad or hard and difficult and I work to find a way to be all right with it, with whatever happens no matter what.
But no preference is something I walk with in the moment. It's a constant state of presence. It isn't active or reactive; it's simply the membrane in my consciousness that lets the wind of experience flow through. Residing in no preference means it doesn't even occur to me to put labels on whatever happens in the world or inside me. All simply is.
I'm reminded of Emerson's transparent eyeball, something that doesn't reflect but absorbs. "...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
I like "absorb" instead of receive. To absorb is an action while to receive suggests passivity. I want to take everything in, to merge my consciousness with everything that is, to touch the universe free of my oh so very opinionated ego. In a sense, to have no preference is to have a mystical connection to experience, to exist in that vibrating state of intense clarity, to feel no separation between self and other.
Alas, I am rarely in that place of no preference. The dailiness of life is filled with choices and opinions. I couldn't get through if I didn't value or discount or judge experience as I go. But I often have a deep seated preference that gets me into trouble. I decide which way I want, even need things to go and if they don't I feel disappointed or rejected or inconsequential, some bad feeling that can be the start of a descent down a rabbit hole. I've come far enough to know that the way out of those bad feelings is to find acceptance of what is, and when I fully connect with it, bad feeling goes.
If I could live with no preference, so much of my pain in life would never exist in the first place. But I think the most I'll manage is a few moments of truly being a neutral filter. But I don't forget hose moments and they give me a goal, an ideal to aspire to. I know that it's the journey not the arrival that matters. It's the journey that makes me alive.
Sometimes, I feel I can talk about anything. Pick a word or a phrase and I'm off and running, discovering as I talk the way one thing leads to another and, if I keep the chain going long enough, coming to something interesting.
There are other times when I feel I have nothing to say at all. My mind is blank and I lack the energy to focus it in on anything. I'm in the fog. I sense that words, images, ideas are flowing through but I barely catch any of it. That's the purpose of the fog; it keeps me in that strange state between focused thought and a constant flow of undifferentiated consciousness.
I think of being in the fog as time-wasting even though I know how productive it can be. My subconscious is churning and occasionally I catch a word or image that releases the energy I need to think about it. I begin talking to myself and one thing leads to another. When that happens, I can feel my insides sitting up, becoming alert. I come out of the fog into clarity. They are each other's flip side.
But I can't rely on the occasional nugget in the fog. If I want to get anything done, I have to purposely focus. That focusing is coming into the moment; it's simply being present, aware of being present. So much of that state is about doing, as if sharpening my thoughts, reaching for clarity brings out the desire in me to act, to think or do something concrete, substantial, an act of mind or body that leads me forward toward something productive.
I let myself slip too easily into the fog. It's an old habit that I'll only break if I practice coming into the present and focusing, through meditation, but also just by looking at the things in front of me, my laptop, my fingers pressing on the keys. That reminds me of QWERTY and the fact that I actually took a typing course in high school and how my parents said I didn't have to go to college - I could go to secretarial school instead, and that was typical of them - not understanding who I was and what I wanted. And how much of a hindrance that was and still is. And...And...And.
One thing always leads to another.
