"Three things are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." -- Henry James
Kindness makes me cry. When I see someone helping someone else out or hear a news story about the kindness of people who take in people caught in an emergency or the thousand other kindnesses that take place in any given day, I'm touched in a way that's different than anything else. It brings tears to my eyes.
I've asked myself why. I think I'm responding to our deep need to touch one another. To give, rather than receive. Kindness is the deepest expression of our desire for community; nothing draws two people together in the way that kindness does. I think there must be a very ancient need in us to help someone who needs it. You can call it our altruism gene but I prefer kindness.
Some kindnesses are anonymous. To give and not need acknowledgement, or want it, or to be in trouble yourself and still be kind to another, is selflessness of a very high order. In Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning," he gives an account of his time in a concentration camp. At one point, he writes that only those prisoners could keep alive who had lost all scruples in the fight for existence. They were prepared to steal, betray friends, use force, even be brutal to save themselves. "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not come back."
Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about a man who started something called the Cloud Appreciation Society. He'd been spending some time in Rome and as he looked at frescoes and religious paintings he noticed they were filled with clouds, masses of the soft billowing kind, but outside the Roman sky usually had very few clouds.
He was in Rome because he needed time off from publishing a magazine in London called "The Idler." He called it "literature for loafers" and advocated aimlessness, letting the imagination wander. In Rome, he thought about the clouds in the paintings and the cloudless sky and just got interested.
Back in London, he began a detailed study of clouds and talked to everyone about them. Eventually, a friend invited him to give a lecture and, in trying to come up with an alluring title, he called it "The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society." The lecture room was packed and afterwards people asked him how they could join the Society. He had to admit there wasn't one but soon fixed that. He created a website where people can post photos of clouds, trade information and, in exchange for $15, get a membership badge and certificate. There are now 40,000 members from all around the world. He's written a book about clouds that's been a great success and now his life is all about clouds.
There are so many reasons to love this story. A deep interest and passionate study of what is possibly the most ephemeral thing in Nature, never fixed, always changing. The fact that this man noticed clouds and wanted to know about them. He didn't second guess himself or wonder what other people would say about his eccentric interest. He just went with it and a world of science, art and literature, not to mention people, opened up to him. Who could have predicted how far the simple act of noticing clouds would take him? Or that people all around the world would share his interest?
Unpredictability. We think we know where things are going or how all our efforts will turn out. Things, disappointing things we couldn't have predicted often come to pass and this is such a common occurrence there are common phrases for it: Man proposes and God disposes. Or from John Lennon: life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. We don't always get what we want. But this man's story shows that the opposite is also true. You don't know where things will lead and sometimes the unpredictable is a welcome surprise, even better than what you thought you wanted.
I can see that for me the challenge is to move forward without judgment or self-censorship, to allow myself to go wherever spirit leads me. I can stop being certain of the outcome of what I do. I can think of the unpredictable, even when it's something I wish hadn't happened, as simply a new set of circumstances to embrace and learn what I can. I can't be without opinion or desire but I can let things take their course and be all right no matter what.
What a rich world the cloud man created; he found it because nothing was holding him back.
William James said about making choices that we should ask ourselves, "Is it productive." Does it lead to expansion and create more possibilities? Will it move you forward toward a richer, fuller life?
This came to mind because I was thinking about mistakes. That word and all the synonyms we use for it - error, blunder, fault, miscalculation - have negative connotations. They make me feel bad; one more time I've done the wrong thing. From now on, I'm going to use James' words - productive and unproductive. They're simply descriptive, without value judgments, which are the last things I need, more cudgels to beat myself up with.
Productive means creative, fertile, achieving. If I had asked myself in the past, "which choice is the most productive?" I might have done things differently. But some of the choices that seemed to be unproductive led me to new circumstances which sometimes led me exactly where I wanted to go. We do what we do, and move on from there.
I can see I'm talking about acceptance, of myself and my life. It's not resignation but the kind of acceptance that frees me from guilt and shame and deep embarrassment about the past. It takes away value judgments and frees the energy that was tied up in all that negativity. That's productive and as long as I'm asking myself what will lead me on, I have a chance to be creative, fertile, achieving.
There are countless possibilities locked away inside me. Some are unknown to me, some when I sense them fill me with fear, some I try to nourish and bring out into the world. It's one of the great dilemmas in being alive - anything is possible but I can only live out a few of my possibilities. Circumstances, choices, crazy ideas - they narrow my possibilities which I don't always realize. I'm locked in my ego and I misread the signs, don't catch half of what's going by, misjudge the importance of events. It can't be helped; it's part of the human condition.
And there is the second guessing, the anxious ambivalence that I may be pursuing the wrong things. But haven't I learned by now that as I go along, there are no "wrong" choices; I simply do what I do, it leads to new possibilities which in turn further lead me on. A life, my life, is always evolving, constantly connecting myself to self.
No matter what I say about this, it comes down to one fact: my time is limited and I can't do all I have in me to do. But I don't have to think that's a lack of fulfilling my potential. Again, I can't do it all. But I can close my eyes and feel those possibilities inside me, the old ones and the new, feel them as a rich fullness. Isn't that what my spiritual life is all about? Feeling the expansiveness of all that lives inside me.
I keep coming back to how resonant the concept of "reconciliation" is for me. Bringing the many aspects of my being into balance. Understanding the past and bringing it into the present. Making the way I was and the way I am now harmonious, unified. When I think about how much has changed in me, what I used to be like, I don't think I've shed or left anything behind. My voyage hasn't been about dropping things by the wayside. It been about embracing all that used to be, and in that embrace making the past, all of it, an organic part of the present. There's no disjunction. My old ideas, the ones that caused me suffering and gave rise to fear - their remnants are at the heart of who I am now.
Evolution is the model, an imperceptible transformation in which I can't point to a clear line between the many steps of change. I can see a moment when things are different but I can't say precisely when that difference occurred, like inhaling and exhaling and not being able to isolate the moment when one turns into the other.
There have been many times in the past when insight has given me a new view of my past. Often, I felt ashamed of all I hadn't known, how wrong I had been about myself, embarrassed by things I said and did. Instinctively, I wanted to run from that vision of the past. But somehow I learned that the desire to run would only continue the cycle of denial and self-loating. Freedom would only come when I looked clearly with my new vision and completely embraced who I had been. Compassion was the bridge between the old and the new. Compassion was the way to reconciliation.
I can try to explain what I mean but words don't really get at the power "reconciliation" has for me. It sets off many images, the kind we all have, so deep and pervasive we hardly know how to describe them. Mine are grounded in time measured in slow transformations - the viscous liquid in a lava lamp moving in slow suspension, the subtle shifts of light on the color spectrum, the unfolding of a seedling in stop motion. And there's also the image of putting my arms around my younger self, taking her into me and in that taking feel myself expand.
Slow time. Continuous time. A more harmonious self, a wiser self, struggling to be born.
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.
Just what is letting go? You could say it's moving away from old ideas and embracing the new. It usually comes out of a spiritual or psychological admission of powerlessness, a willing surrender to whatever it is that represents to you a power greater than yourself. It's the search for the courage to take your hands off the rock you've been clinging to, the steering wheel of a car you thought you could run. It's a release of whatever has been holding you back, and if you can't see what's up ahead, you have the faith and its child, courage, that you will be all right.
I'm fascinated by the fact that we can let go, that we can shift from one way of being to another, widen our perspective, discover new ideas, see what we haven't noticed before. Sometimes it comes in a sudden burst - I was blind but now I see! - but those awakenings, conversions, and thunderbolts of clarity and intuition are rare. For most of us, change happens slowly, step by step, until we realize we're in a different place.
I'm sure scientists and philosophers would laugh at my fascination. I imagine them saying, "Duh - that's what consciousness is." I suppose what I mean is that I'm in constant awe of the miracle of consciousness. That it springs from the brain in a way we still don't understand. That it's given us the ability for self-awareness, to look at ourselves and others and understand that we're separate, to feel an inside and an outside to our bodies, to project the future and know that we are going to die. It's at the heart of our ability to feel love. Well, it's at the heart of everything when we're talking about human beings.
It's impossible to say all of what consciousness is and what we can do because of it. I'll leave that to the experts, the neuroscientists and the artists. But I know what my fascination with consciousness does for me. It fills me with awe, an awe that doesn't come all that often in my every day life. It makes me feel I know what miracles are. When I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking of the deepest things with the deepest part of me. It gives me a sense of spiritual connection - which of course occurs in my consciousness.
I was thinking about how humans are symbolizing animals. Culturally, we've created huge symbol systems - God and morality to name two of the most complex. "God" is made up many symbols - rituals and sacred books, houses of worship, the tenets of faith, rules and regulations - each of them symbolizes particular ways of being and belief and all of them are multiplied mind-boggling times all around the world. Morality is fluid with symbols that are always evolving - ideas of "right" and "wrong and should" (two very complex symbols) mean different things to different people and are always subject to change.
But there are much smaller symbols up and down the symbolic ladder; every time we use something as small as a word, we're using a symbol. We have a symbol for that thing with legs and a flat top - table - but "table" is arbitrary, simply something we've agreed to call that particular thing. It could easily be called Fred and if it was we'd see the thing with legs and a flat top. For each of us, "table" gives rise to an image in the mind but I have no way of knowing if our concepts of "table" exactly agree. I may see a dining table; you may see a coffee table, while others may see a very long line of "tables." It isn't the table that arises in our minds; it's the concept, the symbol of "table," which has individual and private connotations for each one of us. Also, we may not picture anything at all when we hear or read (a purely symbolic activity, nothing but words giving rise to images and ideas) "table". We're so familiar with what it is that we don't need to stop and visualize anything at all, at least not consciously. It's like not actually reading the names of characters in a Russian novel; after a while, we don't see a name or even a group of letters and we still know exactly who is speaking or being discussed..
All that is an unnecessarily complex prelude to the simple reason I was thinking about symbols in the first place: my love of vistas. When I stand looking out at a wide vista, I immediately feel expansive, exalted, have a certain sense of grandeur that only comes for me from the widest possible view. Time stops as I look out and I can feel how eager I am to take it all in, to note every last thing about the landscape and the color and the light, and I can gaze with time stopped until I feel full.
"Vista" has become a powerful metaphor (a symbol) for me. Alone in my room or just moving through the day, I can think "vista" and feel an echo of what I've felt at the brink of a high cliff, the top of any mountain, even the 35th floor of a building with an unobstructed view. "Vista" helps me step back for a higher perspective on myself. It sets off something optimistic and connected in me, an energy that wants to go forward, to embrace the most encompassing view of all my possibilities. "Vista," what it symbolizes to me, sets off the feeling of freedom.
Everyone has their individual metaphors and symbols. For some it's the ocean while others see the forest or a still blue lake and idiosyncratic others I can't even guess at. The important thing is that we nourish these symbols of aspiration, allow them to put us in touch with our best nature as they expand our sense of self. They become one of the most inspiring elements of change.
I've said many times that the solution lies in letting go of whatever it is that's blocking me. It sounds as if it's easy and simply letting go - however I understand it at any particular time - will quickly bring change. I know from experience that isn't so. Whatever the change I've wanted, I've had to become willing to struggle to let go and I've had to do it over and over again. It's true that every time I've let go and let new energy come into my life, it's helped me stay on the path to change. But sometimes that's barely discernible. Time goes by and it feels to me that I'm making no progress. No progress at all. It's very easy to get discouraged.
I've had to learn change only comes slowly. I can't think of a time it's come all at once. Even when I believe I'm willing, I may still make no progress at all. My willingness meets resistance and I hang motionless at the dividing line. Nothing will happen if I'm not willing, but it's also true that nothing will happen until I acknowledge my resistance and work to let it go. That's the letting go behind the letting go. It's a very long process.
Do I want to stop smoking? Yes, I'm willing but I can't seem to get to actually throwing the pack away. I'm afraid of who I'll be without the crutch of a cigarette; I don't think I have the discipline. I'm ambivalent, and some part of me is echoing St. Augustine's famous "Lord, make me abstinent -- but not yet." A lot has to happen internally to allow me to get past that "not yet," to bring me to being unafraid to risk knowing who I'll be without a cigarette and to imagine that I might have the discipline after all. Willingness has to wrestle with resistance until finally I'm no longer ambivalent and am ready for a real attempt at letting go. That takes a long time.
Do I want to let go of pride and arrogance? I'm very willing but in fact I don't understand how pride and arrogance work in me. I remember once signing up at a temp agency that gave a basic math test. I couldn't believe how simple it was so I did it quickly and although there was time to go over my answers I didn't think I needed it. Well, I was shocked, shocked to learn I had gotten three wrong. It wasn't until much later that I understood why I didn't take the time to check my answers: pride and arrogance. I had known their dictionary definitions but I hadn't a clue of how they worked in me. I prayed to be willing, I thought I was willing, but I still had to uncover all the subtle ways pride and arrogance lived in my consciousness and affected my actions. Only then could I make much progress in letting go. That takes a long time.
Sometimes change moves at a glacial pace and it's easy to get forget that wheels are turning inside. But once you know what you're aiming at - giving up cigarettes, learning to recognize pride and arrogance - the process is set in motion. When people quote St. Augustine, it's usually to nod in identification with that "not yet." But it was the first part of that prayer that moved him step by step toward change.
I'm a very impatient person. I want things when I want them and if they don't come quickly I'm as likely as not to give up trying to get them. The voice that says, "Nothing is happening. Why bother? Give up," is sometimes very loud. It repeats and repeats, a negative mantra, installed in me a very long time ago. But I know now that voice isn't telling me anything that has to be the truth. It's only an old habit, a way for me to have excuses not to do the hard thing, not to struggle with my own imperfections, not to aim high. I'm able to pay less attention to it than I used to. I practice patience and do what I can to deepen my faith in my own possibilities. And I remind myself, as many times as I need to, that change, deep change, only comes slowly.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally toward whatever way they like.-- Lao Tzu
Don't go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -- T.S. Eliot
Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action. -- William James
We know what we are, but know not what we may be -- Shakespeare
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.
Years ago, I saw a Japanese movie about a kind of way station between life and whatever comes after. The newly dead came there to think about and settle on the most beautiful or happy or important moment that they would like to take with them into eternity.
There was a little girl at the station. When she was asked what moment she'd like to have for eternity, she quickly answered Disneyland. Well, the attendants said, why don't you take some more time? It took the girl a while but she finally chose a moment when she was in bed and her mother was nearby and she could see sunlight on the blanket over her. When she chose that one the attendants were ready to let her go.
I don't remember much of the movie, including its title, but I do remember that little girl and the memory she chose. It makes me think of all the movies in which someone is dying or about to die, he or she looks up and the camera pans up to the sky and trees. When everything else is falling away, including life, we see the world, the ordinary beauty that's all around us. It's Tolstoy's honey - we reach for the honey.
The other day something reminded me of what I used to call my terminal self-consciousness. It was as if there was a camera in the ceiling recording my every move and I worried constantly about how I was doing. Sometimes, I felt I was lurking behind my eyes, looking out at everyone and everything, assessing. What did this person think of me? Was this the person I should be talking to, instead of someone else across the room? That person is wearing the wrong shoes so I should get away as fast as I can.
The camera in the ceiling, the lurking behind my eyes - nothing happened without my constant worry that I would be seen in the wrong way, or reveal something shameful, or be found wanting by the cool people, whoever they were. It was all about judgment, judging myself and all the rest of you. It was exhausting but I couldn't rest - judging others and being afraid others were judging me kept me very busy.
I couldn't be in my body and I couldn't be in the world. In that self-consciousness, I didn't see anything apart from myself. Everyone was an object that revolved around me. I didn't understand it was narcissism; how could I be narcissistic if I was afraid all the time and condemned just about everything I did?
I couldn't survive in that place. In a way, it was a matter of life and death - self-consciousness and its friend ambivalence would have taken me down, stripped my life of pleasure, enjoyment, the freedom to create. Desperation made me willing to surrender, just surrender all the anxiety, judgment and second-guessing. You take it, I said to the universe, because this is killing me.
I can narrate some of the steps in my changing. Surrender created a sliver of space in which I began to understand that my terminal self-consciousness and reflexive judging weren't standing on anything solid; they were habits of thought, ephemeral patterns of behavior that were just passing across my vision. I saw that they weren't "reality," whatever that was, and there was at least the possibility that reality might be something different. Surrender, hope, willingness became my building blocks and their solidity gave the courage to untie the knots inside. A slow process began, one that's still going on, and I hope it will always go on because I will never come to the end of the possibilities of getting free.
I can narrate the steps of this process, but I don't know why it came to me. It's not because I'm special or more deserving that anyone else. I can see that at every step I made the right choice, the one that would lead me on toward change, and I can see that I was willing to stay in the process, not matter how painful or frightening it was. But I don't feel I can take much credit. I didn't make something happen. Something happened to me.
I was talking about grace this morning which William James defines as a sudden inrush of energy, energy that seems to come from outside us, beyond the confines of our consciousness. I have felt that energy many times and when it was most needed. The energy of grace has kept me moving on.
I've been feeling gratitude all day for how far away I've come from fear, what I call my terminal self-consciousness, second guessing my choices, being on my case so much more than off it, and many other things that were keeping me from feeling equanimity - at least from time to time. Fear made me a block of ice, unable to melt enough to learn something new. I didn't know it, but I was looking for faith, some hope that there was a benevolent force in the universe that wanted me, would help me, to be all right.
My fear was an unchanging oppression but faith was not. Faith grew and for every inch it gained, fear lost an inch as well. Slowly, growing faith brought my fear down to size, until I was able to find the courage to soften, to become receptive, to take the risk of surrendering so that something else, aside from me, could come in and help me change. I began to experience for myself the power of spiritual principles - powerlessness and surrender, faith and courage, belief in something beyond myself, that benevolent power for change.
No wonder I'm often flooded with gratitude. I've found the path to peace and acceptance even though sometimes it takes me a while to get there. When I feel gratitude, I'm thinking about all I have, not what I don't have. Gratitude comes out of the deepest part of me and fills me with love for the world. It has the expansiveness, the grandeur of deep connection to the world. I call it the aristocrat of emotions.
I used to hate it when the person sitting next to me in a public place started talking to me. In a restaurant, on the subway, sitting on a park bench - wherever it was, I would show a tight little smile and then turn away. How dare that person invade my space; anyone who would do that should be taken out and shot.
Well, I'm now the person who starts talking. It could be anywhere - if there's a person standing next to me, chances are I'll begin a conversation. It isn't always welcomed. Sometimes I see someone turn away just as I did, strangely enough usually young women. With them, with everyone, I don't usually go on. A sentence or two will satisfy what I suppose is my need to connect.
I like these small connections. A man and I heading for a door at the same time. You, he says. No, you, I say, and we go back and forth a couple of times. By the time one of us gives in, we're both smiling and carrying it forward. In a restaurant, asking the person at the next table what she ordered. It looks delicious, I say, and often that person will tell me exactly what's in the dish, or add some personal detail. Other incidents may be more intense, a quick exchange of energy. They've become something I seek out; they're part of the texture of my day.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I had a dog and a couple of times a day we went for walks around a pond not far from my house. My wonderful dog, Buster, died and I had no reason to take all those walks. But weeks later, I went down to the pond. I passed a woman I'd never noticed before and she stopped me. She wanted to know how my dog was. When I told her he had died, she said she thought maybe that was the reason she hadn't seen the two us in such a long time. She said how sorry she was and I continued on. I found myself so moved, that I never realized that Buster and I were part of the texture of other lives. It turned out I was part of a community, a walker of a little white dog who other people saw twice a day.
We're connected even if we don't know we are and there is energy in that connection. I think that's what my talking to strangers is all about. Connection gives me energy, stimulates my spirit and mind. Those simple small connection make me part of the human community, individual and at the same time one of many. They make me feel at home.
Years ago I went to a birthday party for a friend. After we sang Happy Birthday and ate the cake (this was a westside of Los Angeles group and probably half the crowd had given up sweets), we went around the room, and took a turn saying what my friend meant to us. I remember how calm she was, taking it all in, and I thought to myself I couldn't bear to be the recipient of all that attention, that loving attention. I thought, I would rather die.
It's strange to remember a time when I couldn't receive compliments or hear anything good about myself. Very strange...I was desperate to shine in the world's eyes and yet I'd do everything I could to deflect the good things people said about me. It was a kind of extreme embarrassment but something more - there was an ocean between the compliment and what I thought of myself. I knew the muck inside, the doubts and fears, the pessimism, so I couldn't sit still for anything good said about me.
And something even more. One day I was brushing my hair, looking in the mirror, when a voice inside me said, "I want, but I can't have." I knew instantly this was a voice from the deepest part of me; I knew that at rock bottom I believed I would always be denied, could not have all the things I wanted, would always live with frustration and despair. It was the voice of my emotional anorexia, my perverse inability to take in all the kinds of nourishment every person needs. I lived on the razor's edge, ravenous and self-denying all at once.
Reader, I've changed. I can trace the path to change, the watersheds and landmarks that made me willing to see what was inside me, and gave me the courage to look. I can feel the many moments I was forced to surrender self-loathing and -denial bit by little bit. I can feel all the times I had very little to go on except the faith that if I didn't run from whatever truth I found inside, I would somehow be all right. I had been covering up so much fear and lacerating beliefs about myself and I'd been terrified that if there was one little chink in my armor the whole facade would collapse. But I learned the opposite was true: in Leonard Cohen's words, "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." That's how the light gets in.
The light has come in, slowly, so slowly that sometimes I've thought nothing at all was happening. But many wheels inside were turning, are still turning, and I've learned to walk the braided path of willingness, surrender, faith and courage. Each of the strands is crucial and takes its turn at the forefront of my being. The more time passes, the more I see that braided path is the only one I can walk now, and more and more it's the only one I want.
To find a way to come out from under self-loathing and fear is the greatest gift, one I receive over and over. I unwrap the gift with gratitude and humility and sit quietly so that more light, and even more light, can keep coming in.
The other day I was remembering a period in my life when I was obsessed with a certain kind of pottery. I covered miles and miles of Southern California searching for it in antique malls and flea markets. When I found a piece I wanted, my heart would race, I probably was flushed - and I just had to have it. It didn't matter how many pieces I already had; I simply had to have more.
I can see the benefits of that kind of obsession. It focused my time and my thinking. There was no guesswork to planning the day; my time was structured around the hunt. I didn't have to think about anything else - all the things I wanted to do, the things I wasn't doing, any of the feelings I had which made me uncomfortable or depressed or fearful. An obsession is an easy way to get out from under having to take a good look inside. I was afraid of what I'd find there and I can remember times when I was very low thinking how much easier life would be if I was a heroin addict. My life would be about only one thing, getting the next fix, and everything else would fall away. In fact, I was afraid of heroin and I think I see why: I sensed that some part of me craved addiction itself, understood its powerful seductions, and felt how easy it would be to become hooked.
Have I had any "good" obsessions? I'm not sure but I know they exist. I think of the mathematician going sleepless trying to solve a problem, or a painter making painting after painting trying to solve the riddle of the canvas. So many socially acceptable obsessions...
But each of us knows when our interests are veering off into self-destruction or just something I'll call self-waste. There's a tipping point, and suddenly something or someone is taking up too much room, getting in the way of things we have to do or explore. Obsession is all about lack, the need for something or someone to fill the hole inside, to "fix" us. We know when that hole has torn through the fabric of our daily lives and become all we can think about; we know the pain of that enormous need.
When I think about how obsessions, both small and large, used to rise up and claim me, I see how much I've changed. It's not that the part of me that is available for obsession has completely disappeared. It's that the part of me that wants to come out from under its sway has grown stronger. I recognize now what it feels like to be consumed by a particular hunger and I don't want to feel it. I know now I don't have to be claimed or consumed and that's what makes the difference. I've learned that even the strongest feelings of obsession are ephemeral and can be released bit by bit, as if I'm peeling one finger at a time off a prison bar. What I think, what I feel are all creations of the choices I make. I may not get free quickly, but knowing that I can, that it's possible, has permanently changed the dynamic. The part of me that feared the seduction of obsession, the part of me that craved it, has come so far down to size, it's lost the power to prevail.
That's all I can ask for. I don't want to be transformed, all my struggles washed away. I want only to understand them and see that I have a choice.
Left to my own devices, I often choose to be alone. I work alone so solitude is necessary. But when I have nothing in particular to do, solitude feels comfortable and rich; my mind and curiosity are very good companions. I feel like I have all the time in the world. It feels like freedom.
I'm not often lonely - which is very different than solitude. Loneliness feels as if I'm incomplete; I feel a longing for someone or something I don't have. Loneliness asks the outside world to come in and make a change, and it makes me feel as if there's something wrong with me.
I once said to someone that I spend too much time alone. She said, "You like to be alone. What's wrong with that?" There's the rub, another appearance by my old friend "should." I should be different than I am, do different things than I do. It's ambivalence as a tyrant, not letting me rest peacefully in my choices.
But I've had a lot of time getting to know the place in me where my ambivalence and all those shoulds live. Sometimes they fully claim me and seem my only reality. But in fact I always have another choice: I can sit quietly, focus and after a while watch them dissolve and drift away. As they go, they leave behind the space where peace and acceptance live and, after another while, I know that I'm all right.
(There's a very interesting book by Robert D. Putnam on the collapse of community in America. It's called "Bowling Alone," the saddest title I've ever come across, more than sad - tipping over into despair.)
Somewhere I came across the phrase, "like bulletins from the subconscious." That's what the images that emerge from the depths of my being are - revelations, instantiations, symbols that sometimes have to be deciphered. Certain dreams have images that are intense and compelling; they stay with me because I can sense the importance of what they're telling me.
One of Delmore Schwartz's most famous short stories is, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." I hear that title as a challenge - when images appear in meditation or sleep or simply as I move through the day and seem to be significant, it is up to me to explore them, sit still long enough to understand them and then be willing to take action on them, either in the world or inside me. It's a moral challenge - once I see something I recognize to be the truth, even if it scares me, I have to pay attention, take responsibility - especially if it scares me.
I used to fear to look inside, fearful of what was hidden there, as if my center was a black lagoon with monsters below the surface. I learned only slowly to let go of fear and allow true information to reveal itself. I came to see that what I feared was only neutral information, my own particular stuff, which I could learn from and transform. I could accept that I wasn't perfect and it was all right to have work to do. More than all right - necessary if I was going to make any progress on the path to freedom.
I had an appointment for an out patient surgical procedure this morning. I was nervous and used the twenty minute wait to meditate to calm myself down. Suddenly, I remembered years ago when I had a biopsy and felt much was at stake. I was in the changing room in a state bordering on panic. I was trying to breathe in and out when an image came to.
It was a ring of low stones. I see them very clearly, granite chiseled into rectangles embedded in the soil about six inches high. A voice came, "Step out of your fear. Step out of your fear." I closed my eyes and pictured myself slowly slowly slowly stepping beyond the circle of rocks, onto the cool grass. When I opened my eyes, in a miraculous way, my fear was gone. Whatever will be, will be; I'm ready for anything. The biopsy was positive and there was a long process in front of me, but that was the first and only time I felt panic coming on.
Over the years I've returned to the image of the stones whenever I'm facing something that makes me nervous. It's a primitive image, a miniature Stonehenge, and it comes from a deep place. Some would call it grace. I don't know. But I believe it comes from the deepest part of me, the part that wants to survive, to transcend my fear, to be all right.
What happened in that changing room still astonishes me. Fear came up and claimed me and I felt powerless, my being taken over, and yet the stones emerged and I obeyed the voice and stepped outside of my fear. In only a few moments, I was in a different place. I don't know how consciousness shifts in this way, but I know it can. I can't always quickly step out of fear and doubt and the signs which say, No. Sometimes, I have to picture the stones many times. But I know it's possible to move the fear, I know it from my own experience, and that is everything.
