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. 

Annals of Successful Parenting: Humility

I’m going to come right out and say that this past week I hit a low. I was humbled. A good friend’s mother died, and instead of being able to help her out by picking up her son from school, I was at the vet with our fancy dog. As it happened, what I thought was a matter of some urgency, namely ticks on the belly that I was unable to remove, was something else. 

So, the back story on this is that the husband and I left the 10th grader home over the weekend, while we went to visit the college student for her 19th birthday. Said college student had arranged sufficient buffers between herself and us that our presence on her birthday was acceptable to her. The 10th grader had PSATs to take and the Homecoming dance to attend, so being the freewheeling parents we are, we left her to her own devices. 

Actually, she was well-armed with emergency phone numbers, and had a friend to go to the dance with, who would come and sleep over with her to keep her company. I knew my neighbor, E, would let me know if there was some kind of wild party happening. So all was in hand.

She said, not at all defensively. 

We took the college student to lunch, and then dropped her off at her college and spent the evening with our Yankee friends. Sunday morning, we walked around the lake on campus and fed the college student again. While we were heading home, the 10th grader discovered a tick on the dog’s head and texted us. We were able to guide her through the tick’s removal via speakerphone, while driving on the Mass Pike, thus confirming her interest in becoming a veterinarian. Then, the next day, frolicking in the the yard, I saw these inflamed spots on the dog's belly. Ticks. More ticks. And clearly Deer ticks, vectors of horrid disease, judging by their size and color. So I tried to remove them. With tweezers. With a special tick-removal spoon. I am very good at removing ticks, usually. But these suckers were not budging. And the dog was whining. So to the vet. 

Where I learned that these were not what I feared.

“These are nipples,” said the vet. 

Nipples! I thought of the tweezers.

“And these are skin tags.” 

Skin tags! I thought of the tweezers again. 

The vet looked at me. I thought, My, this veterinarian is young. 

“This happens more often than you might think, so don’t feel bad,” she said. 

Don’t feel bad! I thought of the tweezers. I tried to remove my dog’s skin tags and nipples with my Tweezerman tweezers. Those are serious tweezers. 

I mean, really, I know about the dog’s nipples. I have seen the dog’s nipples many times. So how could this have happened? I ask myself this more often than is probably healthy. Fortunately, our fancy dog isn’t long on memory and he has moved on. I can only attribute this lapse to the category 5 cold that was collecting in my head. A category 5 cold that moved in and blocked out a great deal. Certainly my powers of reason and my knowledge of dog anatomy. 

So I hunkered down and watched many episodes of “Lady Dynamite.” I’m not sure I recommend the show, so don’t blame me if you don’t like it. And now I feel better. 

Speaking of attempting to remove my dog’s nipples, I’ve been thinking about humility. Humility and success. In one of our recent accountability conference calls, my friends C and E and I were talking about self-promotion. I’m terrible at self-promotion. I can hardly convince myself to post my blog posts. And every week I wonder if I dare bother people on my mailing list with yet another blog post, whose only dubious (if any) benefit might be to reassure the reader that she has never done anything as dumb as trying to remove her dog’s nipples with tweezers. Anyway, at some point in our conversation about self-promotion, C said she was sick of self-promotion. She was going back to humility. It had always worked for her in the past. This made me think of the list of positive character traits I posted on the fridge a few years ago. It’s still there. Humility is one of them. 

Synchronously, I happened to be rereading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. I came upon the chapter in which he describes how he developed a list of virtues for himself. Along with each virtue, he created “Precepts” for maintaining them. Many of these precepts have stuck with us, because not only were they essential molecules of wisdom, but also he wrote them such that they stuck as aphorisms. For example, his number one virtue is Temperance. The precepts under temperance are, “Eat not to dulness. Drink not to elevation.” 

Then, to help ingrain these virtues in himself, he devised his famous virtues chart. At least I think it’s famous. Is it? Have you heard of it? He set up this chart in a notebook, devoting a page to each virtue. On each page, he put the virtue at the top, then a chart with the days of the week across the top and the list of virtues (abbreviated to first initial) down the side. “I determined to give a Week’s strict Attention to each of the Virtues successively. Thus in the first Week my great Guard was to avoid every the least Offence against Temperance, leaving the other Virtues to their ordinary Chance, only marking every Evening the faults of the Day.” So each night he would mark by any of his virtues that he failed to uphold, with a goal of having no marks all week along the line of the virtue he had chosen as the focus that week. By running through his set of virtues several times in a year, he hoped to succeed in having no marks at all to indicate failings by the end. 

This is all very admirable, and accounts for Benjamin Franklin being hailed as the original American self-help guru. But what was amusing was that originally, he had come up with twelve virtues. It was the suggestion of “a Quaker Friend having kindly inform’d me that I was generally thought proud,” that caused him to add a thirteenth virtue, humility.*

You didn't ask, but in case you were wondering, I think he should have added a fourteenth virtue: Generosity. After reading Jill Lepore’s fascinating Book of Ages about Benjamin’s sister,  who struggled financially her entire life, I was left wondering why her wealthy big brother didn’t give her more money. How hard could it have been? So, he's not perfect. And perhaps lack of generosity is worse than trying to tweeze the nipples off of your dog. 

But I digress. I agree with his Quaker friend about humility. Caroline Adams Miller talks about the importance of humility in developing grit in her book. "People who are humble are open to self-improvement and are willing to seek out feedback to become better," she says. So I guess that Benjy Franklin did have it. You might as well have it, too. Because one way or another, we all get humbled. It might hurt less if we can embrace it. 

I know, I used this photo before, but Milo didn't want to show his nipples. 

*Precept: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.