Hello, Readers,
A friend I hadn’t seen in a while asked me what I’ve been doing lately. I answered honestly: I told him that I have spent much of my time ordering clothes online and then returning them. My Saturday routine has become bundling up my too-small, too-big, too-dumb, wrong-style items and dropping them off at the UPS/USPS pick-up spot near me. It’s become an obsession.
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.
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!
Readers, how do you feel about dental work?
As I write, I sit here with a modern poultice of clove in my tooth. Yes, I said poultice, as in the old-fashioned plaster poultice that is so often applied to injuries and wounds in nineteenth-century English literature. In Jane Austen, for example. Mustard plasters and poultices were the go-to’s for first aid back then. Well, Readers, I have endured some dental work involving medicated cement in place of an old filling. This is known technically as a temporary filling, but I prefer poultice. Having dental work always strikes me as a close cousin of the barbaric practices of yore. In other words, it is something to be avoided.
However, I was unable to avoid a particular jaw & tooth situation, which may have been (definitely WAS) created by the pandemic: jaw clenching. Clenching led, apparently, to some difficulty with a filling. You don’t need details, and really, I apologize for this much detail. Who needs it? It’s not even the point of my blog post.
As I prepared for this feat of bravery—sitting in the dentist’s chair and allowing him to perform his barbaric art upon my mouth—I thought about a recent article in Psychology Today magazine by Judson Brewer, M.D., Ph.D., professor at Brown University and clinician. His basic idea is that anxiety and worry are a habit created by a continuous feedback loop. A habit is a conditioned response, as we all know from Psych 101 or just hearing about Pavlov’s dog hearing a bell, getting a treat and salivating at the expected pleasure, over and over until just hearing the bell would stimulate the dog to salivate.
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| These are not Pavlov's dogs |
A habit of anxiety and worry is also a conditioned response. You feel anxious, so you worry—worry and anxiety are two different things. Brewer built his research on that of Borkovec in the 1980s, who discovered and posited that there is an element of habit in anxiety. Anxiety is a physical sensation; the sensation triggers worrying (stimulus and response), and that responding over and over to the anxiety sensation creates the habit of the anxiety-worry cycle.
trigger-behavior-reward
The apparent glitch in this theory is that worrying is rewarding. Do you find worrying rewarding? Well, Brewer says, in a certain way, worrying IS rewarding. Because anxiety is about uncertainty; we feel anxious when things are uncertain. Worrying is the response and it is reinforced because when we’re worrying we kind of feel like we’re doing something to address the uncertainty.
Anyone who’s been in therapy—and there should be more of us, if you ask me, but then that’s the business I’m going into—has probably encountered a gentle admonition from their therapist that worrying about, say, the state of the world, makes you feel like you can control it. Or worrying, say, about your daughter driving a twelve-year-old car up and down the Eastern Seaboard, can keep her safe. We know, rationally, the worrying doesn’t do anything; but worrying becomes its own talisman. We’re afraid to let it go, because frankly, when it comes to daughters or the environment, there’s not much we can control.
The good news is that this anxiety-worry habit can be broken. Judson Brewer, M.D., Ph.D, argues that we modern humans don’t need to feel much anxiety and worry. It’s not helpful. Contrary to popular belief it doesn’t keep us sharp and on our toes. It actually makes us feel scattered and creates difficulty concentrating and performing. So we should definitely not be proud of our intense stressed states. We should get out of the habit of having them. This is the stuff of CBT—cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT helps us identify our automatic, negative thoughts. Once we identify them, we can choose different thoughts.
So, according to Brewer, the first step is to recognize that worrying is actually not rewarding. It is the opposite of rewarding. It is unrewarding. It makes you preoccupied. It makes you lose sight of your day and your time and your personal goals. It makes you wrinkled, grey, and old. Okay, no, that’s not true and Brewer didn’t say it. Life does that to you, if you’re lucky (a topic for a different day, perhaps). But anyway, worrying is a waste of time and energy and really doesn’t help hold up the world. This Atlas theory of world-holding by worry just exhausts us. The world will spin even if we don’t worry. Daughters will drive unreliable cars. Life seems predictable until it isn’t and then we feel uncertain. Even if we worry. And even if we don’t.
What a concept. We don’t need to worry. It’s not helpful. In fact, it’s hurtful. This is news to me. I am happy to look at this in a new way.
Now, anxiety is a different story. Anxiety is a natural, primitive brain response to uncertainty. (Again, paraphrasing Brewer). So the next step in breaking the anxiety-worry habit is to respond to anxiety with something that actually is rewarding. Brewer suggests that getting mindfully curious about the sensation of anxiety is one option. I am sure there are others, but that’s what I have for you for now.
Before making the dental appointment, I was full of anxiety about this tooth and this ache and what it was going to lead to. I was so anxious and worried about it that I had to really work my courage up before making the call. Once I had made the call, and Svetlana in Dr. L’s office called me back, I had much less anxiety. This was because, Readers, mindful that uncertainty triggers anxiety and worry, I did the strangely logical thing and asked Svetlana what the heck was going to happen when I got there for my appointment. Armed with as much info as I could tolerate, I headed to my appointment. Since I had spoken to Svetlana, I had much less uncertainty about what was going to happen. As I drove, I noticed that I didn’t feel terribly anxious. I noted that perhaps I felt a bit nervous, but I wasn’t worried. Because I knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t uncertain.
Of course, a moment later, I did start to think that perhaps being neither anxious nor worried was the sign of impending doom, lamb to the slaughter type thing; the unsuspecting woman headed to disaster. My mind traveled to a scenario involving me in the dreaded chair, numbed up and hearing Dr.L say, “Oh dear, I didn’t expect this and now I must drill through your jawbone and attach a wire to keep your lower jaw on your head and by the way you have no more tooth in that spot at all, oopsie.” However, Readers, I have been around many blocks in my many years and I recognized this as a habitual anxiety loop starting up. Because I noticed it, I was able to stop it. Mostly. Remember, it takes time to form and reform a habit. I am not saying I felt completely happy about the coming procedure, but I didn’t feel anxious, just nervous. Nervous is an appropriate, alert state response.
After that was a blur of Novocaine and trying to picture myself on a beach watching dogs frolic, and then the scent of clove wafted into my nose. Sure, my tongue now feels like a hot dog and my lips are like potato rolls. And I am sipping a chai latte through a (contraband, evil) straw trying not to let any liquid dribble out. But overall, things weren’t so bad, because I didn’t make them worse by my habit of anxiety and worry.
Worrying is a kind of holding-on. Worrying is about desiring, usually desiring the prevention of a bad outcome. We all know desiring is the root of suffering. Desiring something over and over and over doesn’t make that thing more likely. It simply reinforces the sense of lack, the wanting in the old-fashioned definition of the word wanting. Wanting means desiring and also lacking. Letting go of thinking things should feel or be different than they are is key to just relaxing in life. Letting go of worry is a habit to establish now.
Or so they say. It’s much easier said than done. However, practicing letting go of worry by becoming curious about how anxiety feels seems doable.
We all want things to be certain, predictable, and permanent. Too bad, us. In fact, according to an article I read called "Decolonizing Social Work," permanence is a Western value.
Do I believe anxiety doesn’t have to exist? That it’s evolutionary trash that should be incinerated? Uncertainty is a cousin of impermanence, and we know how we struggle with impermanence. Uncertainty can make you twitchy. You are always on edge. It creates fear of loss, according to Kahnemann and Tversky, and humans fear loss more than we enjoy winning, supposedly. So, yeah, we value permanence. And yeah, we are out of luck, because what we get is just the opposite.
Lots of ocean and swimming metaphors surface around this topic. Plus ca change the plus they remain the same is that old French adage, isn’t it? Being certain amidst uncertainty, understanding in a visceral way that everything is always changing can be its own kind of certainty, can’t it? This is the goal of the enlightened, I suppose. We befriend our anxiety in a non-clinging sort of way and maybe it’ll fade away. But we never lose our edge, we’re always having to make some minor adjustments to stay afloat. That’s the metaphor. That’s the truth. However, we don’t have to worry about it.
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| We can all feel as peaceful as this scene. With practice. Lots of practice. |
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| Old mug, new Moominbowl |
Hello, Readers. I have been behind on my blog. The reasons are various, including being busy, busy with school and overwhelmed with housebreaking two puppies—what was I thinking? I was thinking about how fun it will be when they’re trained, and not about how much work is involved in training them AND going to graduate school at the same time.
Also, I have been avoiding writing because I have to put in words the sad truth that the Paterfamilias is no more. He died on December 29th, of old age and complications of COVID-19. I am grieving. Of course I am. The anger over how he died—alone in the hospital, very hard to reach by phone or Zoom, is with me. What can I say about a 95-year-old man who died other than he had a long life, a mostly good life, a life with some tragedy and much joy, and he was my father. I am now an orphan.
It’s not a tragedy that he died. We all must die, and he did not die before his time. That would be a tragedy. But how he died was tragic. Alone, isolated, frustrated, and afraid, as so many people have had to die this year. Even when loved ones were nearby and prepared, they couldn’t reach their hospitalized ones. They were trying, like me and my sister the psychoanalyst, to reach their parent by phone, by Zoom, and finding themselves baffled at every turn by difficulty communicating, even if we did manage to get through. That was tragic, to not be with the paterfamilias in the hospital to hold his hand and keep him company.
Nevertheless, there it is. He is not. Life is going on, and I have a new blog post up on Psychology Today that I am sharing with you here. It’s about finding my identity in a profession that is having an identity crisis. Ah, the irony. Please click the link below to finish reading it on the Psychology Today website. The more views the editors see my post get, the better for me. Please continue reading below and click on the highlighted text to finish to post.
Social Work's Identity Crisis--And Mine
I began writing this blog to help me figure how to define myself as a successful person when I had experienced very little of what the world considers success for an individual. And by world I mean my own part of the world, the world of educated professionals. I was not a professional, despite my education, and this ate at me most fiercely. I washed up on the shores of Regret and Should’ve, questioning my focus on writing novels and on being a mother. Worthy endeavors, but I couldn’t see them that way, because they didn’t amount to resumé entries. They were not professional success. I became something of a psychologist-manque, reading up on success and flourishing and goals, steeping in the tea of Positive Psychology and serving it up to you, entertaining myself and others with my forays.
Did you know every year there is an official color? Indeed there is, and the announcement is met with some fanfare in the world of design. The Pantone Color Institute picks it and names it. This year’s color of the year is actually two colors, Ultimate Gray and Illuminating. That’s grey and yellow to you and me. The colors were chosen together because they create contrast and balance. Things being what they are, I guess even paint company employees are looking for answers to our current predicament. “The selection of two independent colors highlight how different elements come together to express a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting, conveying the idea that it’s not about one color or one person, it’s about more than one,” said Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, in a press release.*
Readers, I never thought I’d be passing on success tips from Pantone, but I find inspiration where I must. Optimism and strength are “two characteristics that are needed as we enter the new year,” according to the author, Nicoletta Richardson, of Pantone's colors.* Because things right now are very hard and dark. You know, we’re in it. The days have a ways to go to the shortest one, so we’re still tunneling down and we can’t expect that little upturn that means we’re going to make it out to sunlight again until then. The too short, too dark, too cloudy days. We know they’re going to get longer soon, though, and that does bolster the mood. However, as Kate McKinnon said on “Saturday Night Live Weekend Update” last weekend, it’s well and good to see the light at the end of the tunnel,“It’s just that the light at the end of the tunnel has shown us how stinky and bad the tunnel is.” What’s in my tunnel right now, aside from the wider world of politics and incomprehensibly stupid people, is the paterfamilias with COVID-19, alone in the hospital, in a city far away. Not that distance matters at the moment, because visitors aren’t allowed.
On the side of Count Your Blessings is that he has a bed, he doesn’t need a ventilator, and he has enough energy to complain. On the side of Life is Infuriating, Hard, and Scary is the government’s murderous response to this pandemic means my 95 year old father is alone in the hospital with a disease he never needed to have.
Okay, so what do we do? We gotta get through the tunnel. This blog is about success, at least putatively. Success is sometimes just plodding along. Indeed, often it is just taking that next step. How’re you doing, I would ask my stepmother, as she descended from sharp-witted lawyer to demented old woman. Oh, still putting one foot in front of the other, she would say. It’s what we have to do.
But what can I do? Anne Lamott would say, do what we do: tend to the sick; feed the hungry; cheer the sad; practice self-care. My social work professors are big on self-care, too. What do you do for self-care, they all ask. Perhaps they know something. Perhaps we should listen.
Of course, in times of stress, self-care gets de-prioritized. Okay, so here’s a tip. Don’t beat yourself up about that. Just promise to practice it more when things are better. That way, you’ll establish your practice, whatever it may be, and if it’s a habit, you might stick to it the next time a crisis rolls around. Or not. It’s not perfect. You’re not perfect. Meanwhile, whenever you remember to practice self-care, do so.
Meanwhile, what to do about the outrage? That’s a good one. The answer, of course, is feel it if you feel it. Feel it if you feel it, and try not to get caught up in it.
Because I’m only passing on wisdom, not generating it, at least not at this time, I offer this tidbit from Professor Bonnie Duran of the Schools of Social Work and Public Health at University of Washington, who offers a six word mantra to get you through a bad day: Not perfect, not permanent, not personal. (https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/bonnie-duran-300)
Let that sink in for a moment. You can apply it to many things, but if you’re one to get caught up in the political moment, or to get whipped into a frenzy by covid numbers, or to wring your hands because the reforms you want aren’t happening fast enough or in the right way, just take a breath and remember, nothing is perfect, it’s not personal, and it’s not permanent.
These people who are so incomprehensible to me, they make sense to themselves. It’s not about you; for them it’s about them. It’s not personal. As far as perfect, nothing is perfect. So remember that your idea for fixing the world may be great, but it’s not perfect. Nor is the world perfect. So all solutions once we get out of the tunnel will be imperfect. It’s not personal that everyone else doesn’t immediately grasp your great idea as the best solution. It’s just inevitable. Machinery as klunky as the human cooperative society is never going to move smoothly in one direction. Move it does, however. Remember, it’s not permanent. Now the more Fred Flintstone feet we get moving in the same direction, the more definite the direction and the movement will be, but still, there will always be other feet walking at a different pace or in a different direction. Maybe it's going a direction you like, and maybe it's not. Either way, it’s not permanent.
This brings me to the next point. We can’t give up. Just because life is hard, doesn’t mean we give up. When it comes time to give inspiration, I can’t turn to faith. Sure, humor, sure wisdom (sometimes), sure honesty—I can do those. Faith, though? Faith in humanity I have to some degree. I tend to skew towards faith that people overall are good, that most want to be good and do good.
What I can put faith in is the power of purpose. I get that from Viktor Frankl. In Man’s Search For Meaning he drives home that to survive an existential crisis, a person must find a meaning and purpose to her life. Sometimes the purpose is simply to endure suffering. Bleak as it sounds, it is also a testament to hope. As Frankl worked himself nearly to death at Auschwitz, he told himself his job was to endure the suffering he confronted. We are close to the end of the tunnel, but we know that the light outside is pretty dim, and there’s a lot of scary stuff out there, too, with which we’re going to have to cope. Not perfect, not personal, not permanent helps with suffering, too.
Maybe this post doesn’t seem that optimistic. Maybe there’s a paucity of Illuminating, or is it Ultimate Gray? I guess to that point I say this: it takes both strength and optimism to face the tunnel. “It is possible to practice the art of living, even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent,” says Viktor Frankl, and he should know.
It takes strength and optimism to crawl forward in the dark and believe in the light at the end, and it takes strength and optimism to look at what’s in the tunnel, too. Here's Frankl once more, “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Sometimes the most optimistic thing I can muster is the knowledge that I will feel it once again.
It’s what I have, today, Readers. That’s it.
*https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/pantone-2021-color-of-the-year-36853569
Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. (1959).
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:
—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.
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. Toni Morrison.
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| My shoes |
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| The high school senior's shoes |
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| This junk stays |
7/I in no way intend to make light of the current pandemic, by the way. It’s just that it feels important right now to focus on what I can control. This is Stephen Covey’s first habit of highly effective people. Remember that old chestnut? Seems like the perfect time to revisit the concept of the circle of influence versus the circle of concern. |
| By Tamarocochinop* - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49327477 |
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| I'd be lying if I said this was atypical. |
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| T-shirt from Mass MoCA. Saying by Jenny Holzer. Message from universal wisdom. |
