everyday life

Ease

As I sat in pigeon the other day in yoga, listening to my breathing, the familiar mindfulness meditation language rose up in my head: may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be calm, may I live with ease.  (enormous apologies to Dani, Karen, Katrina, and all of you who can tell me how wrong I have it… that’s how the words come to me, so I’ve decided not to fight it!)

It occurred to me that that was really it: Ease.

That’s what I want.  Everything else I say I want can be folded into this single thing.  I want to live with ease.  To let the clouds of my emotions and reactions skid across the sky of my spirit without overly attaching to them.  To let the weights of sorrow and joy, which are part of my life in near-equal measure, slide off my shoulders rather than staggering under them.

I grimaced as my hips screamed (pigeon is without a doubt my least favorite yoga pose, and equally unquestionably the one I need the most) and tried to return to my breath.  Calm, health, peace, trust, light.  They are all captured by ease.  There was nothing easy about the discomfort – okay, fine, pain – I felt sitting there, my forehead sticky against my mat, my hip burning, my eyes shut as I tried to simply breathe.  This is not ease, I thought, teeth gritted. But it is, almost surely, the path to ease.

I don’t know that I can untangle that paradox yet, but it posits an unavoidable truth: to achieve the life I want – a life with at least some quality of ease – I must head straight into the discomfort and learn to sit there.  Only by facing that which causes pain can I dissemble it, reduce its power, learn to live without such ferocious reactions.

Which brings me back to the breathing and the mantra.  Following those things, hand over hand like palming a rope to lead me through a dark room, seems the only way through.  Through to what I truly, deeply, essentially want: ease.

Roller coasters

I’ve always hated roller coasters.  As in, really hated them.  Last year, on our third day at Disney I finally capitulated to Matt’s endless teasing of me and conceded to go on one roller coaster with him.  Our guide promised it wasn’t “that serious” a coaster.  Sure.  It was all inside, in the pitch black, first of all.  It’s also one of the only roller coasters in the world to go from 0 to a zillion miles a minute in 3 seconds.  No slow clacking ascent for this coaster.  As we sat in our seats, waiting to go, harnesses snapped down over our shoulders.

“Why are there restraints over our shoulders, Matt?” I asked innocently.  I’ve been on many mellow coasters with the kids, which have always entailed a mere seatbelt.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, smirking.

Well, I soon found out we needed the full-body harnesses because we went completely upside down.  Multiple times.  After the ride came to a stop Matt looked over at me sheepishly.  “You’re kind of green,” he ventured.  Then he admitted that was the most hard-core roller coaster he had ever, ever been on.

I still haven’t forgiven him.

So, I still don’t like (serious) roller coasters.  I’m totally fine with the ones where you only have to be 36 inches tall to ride them.  II actually like those.  But the crazy, upside-down, twirling, lose-your-lunch (not to mention your bag, your sunglasses, anything not nailed down) rides?  No thanks.

For some reason I was thinking about that this weekend.  Probably because we just went to Santa’s Village over Memorial Day with our dear friends, and because Storyland and Legoland are on the horizon this summer.  It is easy to ascribe my dislike for roller coasters to my desperate need for control.  Which is real, of course.  My white knuckle grip on the handle of the universe is exhausting, but essential to assure that the earth keep rotating.  Surely this means I hate being strapped into a carriage without any ability to control my speed, direction, or orientation.

But it occurred to me as i thought about roller coasters that there could be another reason I don’t like them.  Perhaps the swooping up-and-down movement along the tracks is simply too close to my own internal topography, which is already a kind of roller coaster.  I climb to outrageous joy and plummet to tearful heartache every single day.  Hell, I do that every hour.  Just inside my own head and heart.  Maybe it’s too overwhelming to also have my body do this.

I know that there is great excitement and learning to be had on life’s roller coasters, both literal and metaphorical.  In 2010 Whit refused to go on anything at Storyland and Legoland.  Literally, anything.  Last summer he gave in to Grace’s determined pleas that he go with her (and me) on the flume ride at Storyland.  He went, wrapped in my arms and frozen with anxiety.  As we neared the top of the rise, as the steep slide down came into view, I gripped him tighter against me, worried about his reaction.

At the bottom, sputtering, our shirts damp from spray, Whit turned to me.  I was nervous to see an expression hovering between terror and awe on his face.  But then, over Grace’s hoots of laughter, he whispered, “Mummy!  My stomach was full of butterflies!”

Yes, Whit, it is.  My stomach is full of butterflies every single day.  Every day of my life I rise and fall, I climb and plummet, I ride a sine curve whose specific contours I neither determined nor can anticipate.  I should focus more on the butterflies and less on the panic and fear.  I will keep trying.

Do you like roller coasters?  I think the world seems to be split into those who do and those who don’t.  If you do, or don’t, why?

Hurtling towards the end

We are now hurtling towards the end of the year, towards the end that exists at the midpoint of a year.  I wrote about it last week.  Both the calendar and the natural world speak of fullness, of the bright, raucous beginnings of the most swollen season of the year.  And yet everything in me aches with endings right now.  Why am I am so finely tuned to this cadence whose beat I cannot hear but nevertheless feel undeniably in my bloodstream?

The flowers of early spring – peonies, rhododendrons, countless others whose names I do not know – are all brown and faded, either drooping from trees or already fallen and ground into mush on the pavements.  Every day I seem to walk through another puddle of brightness on the sidewalk, underneath another tree that has let its petals go under the weight of too much lush beauty.

The tree outside my window is now dense with leaves.  They have transitioned from the first, tentative shoots of bright green to the deep, shiny green color that will fill my window until mid August.  Last week people in caps and gowns swarmed around my town, and Grace and Whit and I had the same conversation we had the year before about academic regalia, about the orange hood I wore when I graduated from business school, about how isn’t it hard to keep those flat hats on your head?

School ends this week, and I know that event is the central note of the painful drumbeat of farewell to which every day is set.  As I did last year, I will take my tear-stained face and camera full of photographs of my children in white and escape immediately to Storyland.  We will hide out in a place that means a lot to all three of us.  A place where I say yes.  A place where magic blunts the loss that limns every moment.  I don’t know many more years Grace and Whit will be charmed by Storyland’s small rides and fairytale attractions, but as long as they are, I will take them.

I can’t run away from the endings, but I can at least take myself – and my children – to a place where for a bit we forget about the closure of another chapter, about the turning forward of our time on earth.  Of course when I’m there, I have to try not to wonder if this will be the last time.  My deep and fundamental awareness of life’s transience comes with me no matter where I go.  The challenge is to not let it overshadow the moments of extraordinary joy.  Like when I hear Grace and Whit squeal with delight at the gate of Storyland.  So I won’t.

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway

It seems like the world is composed of those people who break bones and those who do not.  I’m the former, and my husband is the latter.  At this point Grace seems to fall in my camp.  I’ve been thinking a lot in the last week about what it means to be broken, and then to heal.  I do realize that not everything in life is a metaphor – sometimes a cold is just a cold, a friend told me once – but this one is hard to avoid.

As scars speak of wounds we have suffered and healed from, so too do our bones bear the marks of our journey, our falls and our recoveries.  The big difference, of course, is that bones, when healed, are invisible to the naked eye.  That means that my body is full of healed breaks, bones that have reset themselves, grown back together, not as perfect as before, not as straight, but (as of now) solid

I am easily broken.  And yet I have always, so far, healed.  It’s hard not to ponder why it is that some of us are more breakable than others.  Did Grace somehow inherit my predisposition towards breaking?  It wouldn’t be the only difficult legacy of mine she’s received.  Am I weak?  I often feel that way, there’s no question: fragile is one of the words I would use first to describe myself.  But as I think about this more it occurs to me that this is perhaps just a physical manifestation of my emotional and spiritual orientation towards the world.  Maybe my bones simply echo the way my heart is easily broken, by all the gorgeousness and pain it witnesses every day.  Maybe I don’t know any other way to be, deep down in my core, in the very marrow of my self, than vulnerable to breaking.

I understand that there is great pain in breaking, but I also have to believe there is much to learn.  At the very least it makes me appreciate being whole.  And of course it fills me with awe, the idea that bones, the scaffolding on which our entire bodies hang, can knit themselves back together.  The analogy this offers for life itself is compelling to me, and inspiring. I hope that if Grace did inherit my propensity for breaking she also can see the beauty in this way of life.

Have you broken a lot of bones?  Do you think that makes a person weak?

 

 

 

Undeniably about endings

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

A repost from last year, and very much how I am feeling right now.  I’m in New Hampshire with our extended family, the other two legs of the stool, for the now-traditional Memorial Day in New Hampshire.  Back tomorrow.