musings

porous, Fix You, and simply witnessing another

I listened to Fix You by Coldplay on repeat yesterday morning on my commute to work. It was my second to last day in the office, and my fear of change is really taking root. As I’ve written before, I’m not good at change. I’m especially not good at endings, which feel like they’re piling up right now. I know intellectually that what lies ahead is going to be good, but emotionally I’m still fearful. Because of this I’m in a state even more porous than usual, reflective, melancholy, thoughtful.

I listened to Fix You, over and over, remembering a post I’d written about it last summer. I thought about the notion of being fixed, of needing to be fixed in the first place. I remembered Bindu Wiles’ beautiful post that asserted, in no uncertain terms that constructive critiscim … is a scam. I recalled Kelly Diels’ powerful essay about how we are not put on earth as a corrective action. And I thought about how the idea of wanting to fix someone implies unavoidably that they are broken.

I find myself returning to one of Kelly’s sentences: I am going to meet you where you are. I am not going to try to force you into what I think you should be; instead, I am going to witness you as you are. I am going to try to remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. I am going to try harder to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – most of all, myself – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. And I know I have learned things from others that have essentially changed how I think about myself and the world – for the better. But how to remain open to this while retaining a fundamental commitment to my self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

One of the myriad reasons I read is to learn about people seeing, knowing, and loving others for their fundamental truth. One of my favorite stories about this is The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book that is, to me, a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Maybe my working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is a first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I am as bad as the next person at clinging to my hopes of how someone else will react to me, of stubbornly wanting them to behave a certain way, rather than simply meeting them where they are. I realize what this implies in terms of my expectations of myself.

Maybe this time of flux, when it feels like the ground beneath my feet is heaving around, is the perfect time to address some of these challenges. I feel reminded, in a visceral way, of the fact that I am simply not in control of the world around me. May this serve as a reminder also that I am not in control of other people either.

It is, really, very simple. Compassion. Remembering that people are, mostly, doing their best. That behavior that hurts and stings me usually comes from somewhere deep in the other person that has nothing to do with me (I know, shocker, right?). In many cases, in fact, I should feel privileged to be exposed to the molten core of all that is unresolved and difficult for another person. And perhaps I can turn some of that gentleness onto myself. And see that maybe, just maybe, I don’t need fixing myself.

Forward and back at the same time

Be open to your happiness and sadness as they arise. – John M. Thomas

I love this (also yet another sky photograph). As my Landslide post described, happiness and sadness arise for me out of thin air sometimes, swamping me like an unanticipated wave. At other times they come up with a steadier drumbeat, reaching a more conventional crescendo.

This is, I believe, one of the major tasks of my life: to learn to ride these various swells and ebbs without fear, to honor each moment as it comes, to trust that sadness will eventually make way to happiness again as firmly as I already know that joy will fade away to melancholy.

And after all, the happiness means nothing without the sadness. That is another of the few things I know for sure. What I’m not sure of is whether this is about capacity or contrast. I lean towards capacity, but I’m not entirely certain. I don’t love The Prophet, but one of Gibran’s lines encapsulates this more perfectly than I ever could: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

(a repost from last summer, as we cruise into summer here.  So much is the same and so much is different.  I am still oscillating between happiness and sadness, still zigzagging along the border of light and dark, still moving in those undulating rhythms of life that move me somehow forward and back at the same time.)

There is something holy in authentic presence

 

I was hugely fortunate to be able to go to the MOMA in New York yesterday to view Marina Abramovic’s performance, “The Artist is Present.” I had read some about it, and in particular love this blog of portraits of people who have sat with Marina.

I spent about an hour watching the piece. I’m uncertain as to whether I should call it a performance or a piece of art. I was struck by the austerity of the space. The whole time I was there the same woman sat across from Marina. She was a young woman in a black robe, actually similar to the one Marina is wearing above (which was identical yesterday, but white). The space where Marina and the woman sat was busy, with museum guests walking around constantly. It was noisy, open to the lobby and all of the ambient sounds produced by the hundreds of people passing through there.

Still, somehow, in the large square that was marked off with masking tape, there was a palpable calm. The woman across from Marina originally seemed agitated to me, despite sitting completely still. She seemed to be blinking fast, with a closed expression on her face, none of the emotion that is so visible in the portraits above. And yet as I sat there, she seemed to slow. Marina was shiny from the heat, statuesque, almost wax-like. She had a beatific glow to her, a stillness that radiated.

Two lines ran through my head as I sat on the border between the noise of people going through their days and the deep silence of the performance: “In the room, the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” and “Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence.” I’m not sure yet what message Prufrock and Desiderata carried in their hands; maybe I’ll figure that out as the experience sinks in.

My first and abiding reaction was that this is an immensely generous act by Marina. She offers herself, hours a day, to anyone who wants to participate, who is moved to engage with her. I’m struck by this act of grace, this offering of that most holy and rare thing: our attention. There was a potent energy between the two women, sitting across from each other, something they were sharing that was intensely private and yet accessible by all those who sat and witnessed. I felt peaceful sitting there, and also electrified. (and also old, as my knees were not happy on the stone floor).

The essential message of yesterday is that there is art, and something truly holy, in offering our authentic presence to each other. There’s never been any question about that in my mind, but Marina’s performance made this fact manifest in an indelible, inarguable way. I’m deeply glad that I went and shared in the experience, and know I’ll think about it for a long time.

Earthquake of the soul

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am terrible with endings. Equally terrible with change. The school year draws to a close, the air fills with humidity and the thick, sweet smells of spring moving into summer, and I start to cry. This isn’t even the “end of the beginning” anymore – we are well past that now. My baby is graduating from Beginners. My older child is moving out of the very youngest building at school. Sob. I am already aware of how few days are left in this school year, and I wake each morning with a tangible sense of loss hanging on the horizon of my awareness.

But this year, along with the traditional end-of-school year melancholy, there are other things ending. Our beloved nanny of 5 1/2 years, who joined us right when Whit was born, is leaving. This is her last week. I am leaving the job I’ve been at for 3 1/2 years. I will have the summer without work for the first time in 10 years. There are numerous tiny ways in which I feel like the life I know is about to shift irrevocably, and I do not have steady footing for this ride. The terrain of my life is beginning to move around, I suspect there is an earthquake coming, and I don’t know what to do to keep myself safe. Where is the doorframe, in which you are supposed to seek stability, in an earthquake of the soul?

My parents are sailors. Growing up on boats I encountered my share of those frayed, brittle lines whose protruding roughness can cut your hands. You grab them wrong and you can wind up with a sliver of fiberglass embedded in your palm. That’s how this feels right now: all of these losses, all of these endings, are wound together in a knotty rope whose power is undeniable but whose touch on my hand stings badly. I don’t even want that rope near me, but I can’t get away from it.

These changes flicker at the edges of all of my hours now, and like flames eating a piece of paper they consume them from the outside in. I don’t know how much is left in the middle, so voraciously do these endings seem to take over my thoughts, my feelings, my very life. I know intellectually that the anticipation of a change has often been worse than the reality for me, but this knowledge cannot possible compete with the roaring fear in my spirit. And so I go out into the glorious spring day, trying to keep my hands from being cut by the rope I cannot avoid, trying to keep my eyes on what is in front of me, trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my chest. It’s not simple, this part, for me.

The spaces that hold our memories

I’ve been thinking today about the places in our lives that hold our rawest and most treasured memories. Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a place that hosted an important moment in my life, I can feel that moment, hovering, bumping into me, invisible to the eye but not to the spirit.

The Exeter chapel is one such space for me. The chapel was a place that provided solace and comfort during what were rugged and lonely years for me. There were two specific times each week that I went to the chapel, often alone. I viscerally remember walking in the rough stone door, my sadness leaking from me, and sitting quietly in the dark wooden pews.

Each Thursday morning Exeter had a period called “meditation,” during which a member of the faculty, staff, or senior class read a personal essay in the chapel. The tradition was that seniors wrote their meditations in English class and a select few were chosen to read during our senior spring. Mr. Valhouli, my beloved English teacher, was an ardent lover of this tradition and when he read his personal comments in 1991, I was lucky enough to be there.

I’ve often thought that it took guts for a school that is so heavily judged on quantitative measures like test scores and college admissions to defend the value of the personal story with a tradition like this. It has taken me many years to parse through the legacy of Exeter, beyond that most obvious one, Mr. Valhouli’s teaching. The meditation tradition has had a deep impact on me, for the way it privileges the individual telling of experience, for its high valuing of the learning inherent in telling and hearing stories.

The other weekly time I went to the chapel, like clockwork, was Tuesday night’s evening prayer service. This was the exception to the nightly curfew, and at 9:30 (I think) students filed into the chapel, always lit just by candlelight. “Prayer” is a misnomer for this decidedly secular event: someone would perform a couple of songs, acapella or accompanied, and then read poems or quotes. This was probably my favorite half hour of the week at Exeter. I remember those evenings so vividly, though not the specific songs or readings. I just remember the fullness that I would feel in my chest, the tears that often spilled down my face, the swelling sense of being both entirely alone in this place and somehow part of something larger than myself.

Unfortunately the chapel at Exeter was not open the last time I was on campus. I expect in that space I’d have the feeling I described, of sensing the past in the present. I’d like to go back there and see if I can see, either with my eyes or my heart, the 16 year old me. I feel like she’s there, somehow, in some way. She’s sitting quietly, shoulders hunched, eyes glossy with tears and feelings. I’d like to go back to this chapel which was and is a sacred space for me, one that held some of the most whole and emotional moments of my time at Exeter.