Success in AP2—It’s More Than Coping, but Coping is Also Great, Really. I Promise.

Happy New Year, Readers. It’s been so long since I posted to you, I think my chin hairs have turned into a beard. (Shhh, forget I said that; it’s supposed to remain only between me and my esthetician.)

In this new year, Annus Pandemicus 2 (AP2), I offer a couple of tips for success. They’re not mine, originally, Readers, but I’ve incorporated them into my life after so many years of seeking and redefining success that they seem to be mine. In other words, I am probably plagiarizing, but I can’t remember from whose work. Along the way, I have encountered many teachers, gurus, and charlatans offering their worked-over or reworked bits of universally available wisdom. Home truths, if you will. They have managed to publish and profit from these things, unlike me, but hey, this isn’t a post about bitterness. It’s a post about the opposite of bitterness, which is, of course, sweetness. 

What makes life sweet? Have you seen the four seasons of “The Good Place” on Netflix? I recommend. Friends, family, self-confidence, generosity, striving to be better, and believing it is possible to be so. These are some of the things that make life sweet. More on that another day, mayhap. Or, if you stop reading here, then maybe you’ve got a little something, a nugget, a kernel to hold onto and work over, something to try to unwedge from your teeth.

I have really enjoyed my break from school. I have to say, it was an absolute pleasure to be done with required reading until the middle of January. During the break, I happened upon a book called The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseki, a Zen Buddhist who started the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco in the late 1980s. The Zen Hospice grew out of the San Francisco Zen Center, which, Readers, I visited back in the late 1980s, when I lived in SF. So I almost know Frank. Maybe if I’d actually attended regular meditations at the SF Zen Center, I would literally know Frank. Unfortunately, at the time, I was intimidated by the austerity of the setting and by the little I knew about Zen, so it was another ten years before I got around to meditating. 

What attracted me to the book is that back in 2020, when the paterfamilias was still alive but was starting to fail, my friend loaned me a large bag of books about death and dying that she and her mother had read when her mother was dying. I didn’t read any of the books she loaned me, because the paterfamilias failing was something I didn’t really want to grok, if you know what I mean. So the bag sat around for a long time. Eventually, during a culling of our over-full bookcases, I asked the husband to take all the books we were donating to the big donation bin at the library and he accidentally donated the entire bag of books on death and dying that my friend had loaned me. 

These books had significance for my friend, because her mother had been reading them in preparation for her own death, and now, in the way of books and people, her mother was gone and the books had remained. I felt terrible. So did the husband.

I’ll just fast-forward to say that my friend is still my friend. She took a philosophical stance about the lost books. She said, maybe now they’re being read by other people who really need to think about death and dying. 

Who doesn’t? I ask you. 

I have to add that I did my utmost to try to recover the books, but it was a no-go. So over the last couple of years, I have kept an eye out for books about death to give to my friend. 

This brings me to The Five Invitations, whose subtitle is “Discovering what death can teach us about living fully.” Since I’ve broadened my definition of success to include things like “well-being” and “living fully,” this seemed up the ole alley. And you know, a successful death is part of a successful life. 

What are the 5 invitations? In brief, they are as follows: 

One, Don’t wait; 

Two, welcome everything, push away nothing; 

Three, Bring your whole self to the experience; 

Four, Find a place of rest in the middle of things; and 

Five, Cultivate don’t know mind. 

These invitations are essentially the invitation of all meditation practices, the invitation to be present in your own life as it happens, without adding to your misery by trying to prevent or feeling shame about the bad times, and without expecting that life is meant to be always great. Agathism has to take a back seat to reality. Things don’t necessarily always get better. That’s just the way it be. On the other hand, in the midst of any particular moment in life, the possibility exists for feeling pretty okay. As Jon Kabat-Zinn said, any time you’re breathing, more things are going well for you than not. 

Did I say this was post about sweetness? Well, I want to talk about the idea of rest. Rest, the fourth invitation, is a kind of sweetness. The sweetness of letting go and just letting the shoulders settle, of shutting the door and enjoying a quiet moment at home. 

This idea of resting in the midst of upheaval seems particularly appealing, probably because I’ve been working myself hard in school, while grieving the paterfamilias and the end of civilization as we knew it. While some of my friends have announced a theme word for the year such as “improve” or “strive” or “persist,” I’m drawn to “rest.” Rest does not mean pulling the blanket over your head and waking up when the revolution is over, mind you. It means to find the center—your center—in the midst of upset, busyness, excitement, and goal-pursuit. Rest in the middle of striving, if you will. This is also known, less glamorously, as coping. And coping is really a great approach to life. Coping requires rest. 

So what is rest? There are different kinds of rest. 

There’s the rest from being awake, also known as sleep. That's physical rest. We are programmed to do this every day for about eight hours. For those of us who sometimes experience less than optimal nighttime sleep, the twenty-minute snoozle is a brilliant restorative in the middle of a day. Physical rest of the body. Obviously essential. 

There’s the rest that is residing in the moment. I hesitate to write about this, because it has become a cliché among certain types of people. But there is rest in focusing on the present. Sitting still, taking a breath, and being aware of your body breathing in and exhaling. There’s rest in that, and that kind of rest is super important. Why? Because it gives you a little patch from which to observe what’s ricocheting around in your head and how that ricocheting material affects how you respond outwardly to other people. Do you find yourself swearing at a slow driver? Take a sec, realize that what’s happening now is you’re reacting because you’re late, you rushed, you didn’t take time to prepare. It’s nothing to do with the slow driver, really. 

A rest is a pause, a cessation of activity, and pretty much everything wise comes from actions taken from that pause. 

There’s a concept I’ve learned in therapist school called Wise Mind. 

Wise Mind is the place you want to learn to use as your base of operations when interacting with others. Wise Mind is the overlapping on the Venn Diagram of Emotion Mind and Rational Mind. 

(BunnyPG, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons )

Whereas emotional mind has you deeply in touch with your emotions, when you’re in that state, you’re not acting with any rationality. Likewise, when you’re in rational mind, you’re not taking emotions into account. This is how we get into overwork and burnout, and how we make decisions that railroad over the feelings and needs of others and of ourselves. Wise Mind combines the best of rational and emotional states. But you have to practice getting there. The best way to do that is to rest, to pause, to settle into the present moment, and to observe all the things that are ricocheting around you, internally and externally. 

(Wise Mind, by the way, is a term coined by Marsha Lineham, who developed a kind of therapy called DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) to treat people with major issues in relating to others. Guess where some of her ideas came from? Buddhism and mindfulness. Her therapy helps people learn social and interpersonal skills in conjunction with talk therapy.)

How do you get to Wise Mind? Practice, practice, practice. More specifically, you get to Wise Mind by taking a rest in the moment, pausing to observe what is going on with you. There’s the rest from accepting whatever situation in which you happen to find yourself. Are you in the above scenario? Why make it worse by getting even more agitated about being late? Why berate yourself or others? Why not take a moment, accept that this is what’s happening: you are rushing, it happens; next time, perhaps you can plan better, but maybe you are doing the best you can because maybe something came up, right as you were getting ready to leave. The point is, rest in the uncomfortable truth, and it alleviates some of the your discomfort. There’s the rest in not piling on guilt or a sense of shoulda-coulda-woulda to a difficult situation. 

There’s rest that means acceptance. This is the rest of letting-go. This rest means accepting what is happening when you can’t control it, for one thing. It also means accepting yourself, with all your foibles, is another. Are you the type to get your proverbial panties in a twist over stuff that doesn’t stress out most of the people you know? Don’t make yourself feel worse by should-ing yourself about not being so uptight. Just own it, you are uptight. This has its good and bad aspects, doesn’t it? Maybe all those laid-back others in your life depend on you to think of the details. So, accept that aspect of yourself. Radical self-acceptance, baby. If you remove the layer of non-acceptance of what is, you have a better chance of seeing clearly. Maybe there’s something a bit pathological about your need to control, but you’re not going to be able to change it without looking right at it. You’ve got to rest with it. Rest with it before you wrest with it. 

I couldn’t resist the pun.

Rest can be as accessible as a sigh. At any time, a deep breath provides an instant of rest. It’s not necessary to wait for a vacation to rest. What is necessary is to rest a little bit every day. As my final semester of graduate school ramps up, I plan to remember to rest more, so I can operate from Wise Mind and cope with the vicissitudes of AP2. Bring on the variants! 

Recollecting Impermanence

Hello, Readers. Since last I wrote, the beloved pooch has died. This is terribly sad, and I notice his absence everywhere, for example when I wake up and no longer have to step over a large, sleeping dog. Or when I peel a carrot, and I realize he is not waiting patiently on the doormat for me to toss him the ends. It’s sad and we are all grieving, and yet it was inevitable that we would outlive him, barring unforseen circumstances.To avoid this situation, I would have had to adopt a tortoise, I suppose, but they’re not much good for midday walks. 

Impermanence has, therefore, been on my mind. The truth of impermanence is one of those truths to which we pay lip service. We know life is short, and that change is the only certainty in life, but we usually only know it theoretically, or intellectually, not in a bone-deep way. Yet knowing the deep truth of impermanence is key to appreciating what’s happening right now. Understanding impermanence is the doorway to wisdom, so they say. They, in this case, being Buddhist teachers. 

Buddhist philosophy feels impermanence is so important that everyone, layperson or monk, should contemplate it daily in the form of the five daily remembrances. They are as follows:

1. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to experience illness. I cannot avoid sickness
2. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot avoid aging. 
3. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 
4. I am the owner of and heir to all my actions. 
5. I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me.

Those last two are listed in different order, depending on the translation.

—Upajjhatthana Sutta 

I’m not going to lie, these seem like a bummer. Number five is really hard to take, these days. I lost an earring down the bathroom sink the other day. I swear that thing committed harakiri, because otherwise there is no explanation. Unless it is that my ear holes have stretched and sagged along with everything else on my person? But I mean maybe the earring disappeared to get me to pay attention to the blog post I’ve delayed writing for days. Was this not karma showing me the truth of this contemplation? Really, it’s very sad, this truth. In the way I understand the practice, by facing this idea daily, I am to become less grasping after stasis and more accepting of the true nature of life, that it is transitory, from the briefest mental image or thought, from the strongest emotion to the longest life. Once I accept this, I suppose, I am free from a layer of sadness and anxiety about the inevitable changes, and this extra space allows me to appreciate what is before me more fully than I do when I am worried about something or someone slipping away. Earring. Dog. Daughters. Life. 

I may be a little tender on this reflection, considering the dog, considering that we’ve just dropped the younger daughter at college for the first time. The elder daughter will soon decamp from our comfortable pandemic bubble for a job in Boston. My sister the psychoanalyst is one year older today, which means I am, too. And none of your “she’s only one day older than she was yesterday” folderol. Sometimes the milestones hit you. 

Here’s a secret. I’ve found that when I contemplate these five remembrances, I feel a bit of relief. It’s just the teensiest bit of relief, more of a minute relaxation deep in my gut. I think it has to do with letting go of some of the struggle to collect and keep everyone and everything dear near. I think it has to do with releasing some shame around aging, illness, death, responsibility, and loss. I think there is shame around these things sometimes. We feel that if we experience them, it is our fault for not managing well enough in the world. We didn’t exercise enough, or eat the right food in the right amounts. We didn’t appreciate the gravity of our choices at the time and could have chosen better. Maybe you don’t feel that way, Readers. If so, I am glad for you. For me, I have found it so. Which means, that counterintuitive as it seems for me, these recollections do help me be more comfortable. 

I was informed that my earring, a thing I hold dear, was most likely retrievable from the trap under the bathroom sink. I marshaled my resources to figure that out—by which I mean I texted the husband, who said he would do it when he got home from work.

The husband did indeed find my earring. So what does that mean? It means that sometimes things from which we are separated come back to us. As Sting told us, back in the early 1980s, “If you love something, set it free, free, free.”

Sting’s lyric doesn’t exactly apply to losing an earring. It might apply, however, to letting your child leave for college, and your other no-longer-a-child child leave for a new phase of life as a college graduate working for peanuts and trying to make the world a bit better. By "letting your child" I don't suggest I have any choice in these things. The letting is internal.

However, because of the covid, the new college student will indeed be coming back to us. Her college is only allowing the first years one semester on campus. The rest of the academic year will be remote learning, so that the older students can have a semester there. Oy. Such is the ever-changing nature of things. 

Meanwhile, Readers, I started full time graduate school for social work this week. At the ripe old age of one thousand and ten, I am returning to school for a master’s degree, with a plan to become a therapist. I don’t know if this is wisdom or foolishness, embracing of life, or denial of time passing. Nevertheless, I go forward. I cannot escape illness, death, or aging. I cannot avoid responsibility for my choices or letting go of all I love. Okay. So be it. 

Letting Go

Readers, I have been unhealthily glued to the news and social media. I have been clinging to the news and suffering mightily. As have many of you, I am sure. Probably all of you. I have awakened at a different hour each night, and every time I do, the new POTUS is on my mind. This is really unpleasant, as he is so unpleasant.  And the news is so unpleasant, and yet I search it for new disasters or hints of hope. And as Buddha said, clinging is the source of suffering. 

So I am pivoting, like Kellyanne Conway, i.e. changing the subject to something I want to talk about it. However, unlike Kellyanne Conway, I am not providing #AlternativeFacts for you. 

Our family went to the Women’s March in NYC this weekend. The Women’s March, although a misnomer because it wasn’t only women - not by a long-shot - nor was it only about reproductive rights - was truly amazing. It was a highlight of my life. The MIL joined us, as did a friend of hers. It was so much more crowded than expected that soon the police had to open up the route to allow more people to flow. Well, “flow” is the wrong word. There was almost no movement. It took hours to go a few blocks. We all had to climb over a barricade at one point. I was so impressed that the MIL wanted to go, seeing as she is a grandmother, and there weren't that many grandparents there. And I was impressed with myself and all the other people I know who conquered their fear of crowds and of being stuck without access to bathrooms and of potentially being in a melée.  Well, my bladder held up and there was no brawl. 

Instead, it was peaceful, it was communal, it was a mixed crowd of genders and colors and issues all being compassionate and polite - except perhaps for the person who was smoking what was probably the largest doobie I have ever laid eyes upon. Perhaps some of my bliss came from inhaling that….

but, no, I felt it before I smelled it. The thing was, it felt so good to be around other people who care about the same things I do. And to realize that the crowd was much bigger than had been expected. And then to check social media and see the reports of the marches all around the country and the world. 

And yes, I know, the biggest crowds were on the coasts, which makes some people think this didn’t count. But I don’t believe it. I think the coasts are awake now, and some of the cities around the country had smaller marches, but still had marches, and those liberals are awake now, too. 

Look, I’m not going to have my inspiration sucked away by nay-sayers. It’s true that demonstrations aren’t policy; but they are important. I’ll just speak for myself. I found it fortifying to know I’m not alone in my concerns and in my views. And this knowledge has made me willing to be politically active, something I have not been in the past. I trust others will take away that energy, too. 

There is no way but forward. Forward through the mess. But still forward. 

I read an interesting article about how California is always a harbinger of the future. It has transformed from Republican destruction - with great damage to its public education system, mind you - to a progressive agenda now. I’m not hopeful we will escape the damage part, but I am hopeful that we will move forward with environmental awareness, clean energy, civil rights, and all that good stuff. 

But most of the time, I am roiling with anxiety. I'm anywhere but present and centered, as I'm reading up on what just happened and perseverating on what might be barreling down upon us in future. This is the opposite of being centered and present. 

Bartenders and hair stylists are often amateur psychologists. Mine is no exception. My hair stylist, that is. I don’t have a regular bartender, at least not yet. Anyway, my stylist - let’s call her Dawn - I saw today. In the nick of time, since, as I mentioned above, I am suffering from clinging to the latest news and updates regarding the current political situation on my social media feeds. Well, of course, we did broach the topic, because how could we not? Yet Dawn was smiling and calm. How was this possible? She said she limits herself to fifteen minutes of NPR on the way to work and fifteen minutes on the way home, and that is it. She did, she said, watch the Sunday morning news show this weekend with a friend and got a gander at the Portrait of Dorian Gray that is Kellyanne Conway, spokesperson for POTUS. And was shocked. 

Since she hasn’t been watching or listening to much news, she was actually pretty darn cheerful. Imagine that! We chatted about her recent eye surgery, the results of which are thrilling to her. 

“So tell me what it’s like to have eye surgery,” I said. And she did. When she mentioned with nonchalance that the laser malfunctioned the first time, I was traumatized by proxy. Then, when I asked her how they keep you from blinking, she said, “They use what they use in gynecological exams - a kind of speculum” - and proceeded to describe how it works. Scenes of horror flashed for me. 

“Were you anxious?” I asked, anxiously. “Were you sedated?”

“I don’t get anxious,” she said. “And they did use Twilight on me.” Twilight I think is that delightful stuff that killed Michael Jackson. It really is good. I’ve had it for procedures and you feel so rested afterwards. Unless, of course, you fail to awaken. 

But I digress. The important bit is the bit about Dawn not getting anxious. 

“How can you not get anxious?” I asked. 

“I have bad knees.” This sounded like a nonsequitur, but Dawn is a storyteller, so I waited. “This therapist I see told me that all the trauma I've suffered in my life" - and she has indeed, I know. I waited for her to say this trauma has caused her to dissociate in times of stress, because otherwise, why was she so calm? 

- "all the trauma has left my soul intact, but it all manifests in my body.” 

“Your knees?” I said.

“My knees.”

She continued working in silence for a while and then I told her about my recent experience meditating. This was yesterday. I figured I had better try to center myself (scaffolding of success, key to functioning in life) by meditating while the ninth grader studied and the husband commuted home. And how during the thirty minutes I set aside to relax and detach from the world and cultivate peace, the doorbell rang - the doorbell, I tell you - and then my phone, which had been pretty quiet all day, started receiving text and after text. I heard them all come in, but the phone was downstairs and I was up, so I couldn’t turn it off. So much for peace. 

"Well," Dawn said, “I have the book for you.” She glanced at me in the mirror. Maybe it isn’t the right moment for you, she said, butI read it at the right moment for me. The book is called The End of Your World, by Adyashanti.* “I’ll give you a synopsis. It’s very short.”

“Okay,” I said. 

“Okay, here it is. He says, ‘That thing you think is true? It is not true.’” Which is another way of saying it’s all in your head. So don’t worry about it. 

This sounds facile, I realize, Readers, but it reminded me of a truism I picked up in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is similar: Just because you think a thing is true doesn’t mean it is. Your fear is just fear. It doesn't mean the thing you fear is true. It might come true - true - but then again, it might not. 

So, I leave you with that. 

*An American West Coast guru, according to the interwebs.