A Bargain - the Best I Ever Had

I went for a walk this evening and found myself at the neighborhood thrift store. Aside from low prices, one reason I like this place is because some of the best bargains are hiding in plain sight. This is a metaphor for life, of course, and I reflect on it each time I find a great Large size sweater among the Smalls. Or a CD I've been wanting to hear stuffed in with the cookbooks. Think outside the parameters, advise the wise folk. Stay open to the possibility that good things can come from unexpected sources.

And, I get to pat myself on the back for due diligence on finding a deal.

One thing bothered me, though, as I walked home. Browsing the book section, I'd become quietly agitated. This feeling crops up often in bookstores. It usually happens when I'm not searching for any particular title or topic, but am looking for something new to read. I've always wondered why.

One thing is obvious: there sure is a lot of second rate stuff out there. Third rate too. (I'm talking non-fiction, by the way. I don't have the focus and patience that most novels seem to require.) I can understand an author and publisher wanting their time in the sun, but really - how many trees need to die for yet another volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul?

Really, though, the crux of my agitation is that the search for the "right book" is often a vain attempt to soothe the loneliness of being human. You could say the same for any type of shopping when there's not a specific need to fill. Many of us have spent strangely unfulfilling afternoons at the mall, trying to ease the emptiness or boredom we so often feel.

The kind of books I look for have the potential to deliver more than clothing, cars, drugs, and other distractions from the human condition. They come to us with the premise of education and expansion. And because we give so much authority and weight to the printed word, we expect a lot from these books. They contain thousands of thoughts that somebody went to a lot of trouble to arrange on the page, hopefully in some order that makes sense to our personal predicaments. And, they require a sustained investment of attention on our part. So when a book doesn't pay off for me, I feel especially disappointed.

Perhaps I sense that many authors write from a high-altitude perspective – from a conceptual rather than experiential viewpoint, as William Bridges puts it. He's the author of a well-known book from the 70s called Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. When his wife died about ten years ago from breast cancer, it threw him into a tailspin the likes of which he'd never known. "How could I ever have tried to pass myself off as an expert on transition?" he wondered in a later book. "I felt now that my words had totally failed to match in depth the experience of being in transition."

Ah, authenticity. Honesty! That's what pulls me into a book: confessions that confirm we're all lost and confused together. Bridges goes on to describe how he worked through feelings of being an imposter, whose readers and clients would now see through his charade and resent his ill-gotten reputation. Captivated by his admission, I felt less lonely. His transparency erased the artificial separation created not only by his authority, but by the mass medium of publishing. Momentarily at least, I felt re-connected – to myself, to him, and to humanity, whose every member has a story of suffering and confusion.

You know that melty feeling you get when somebody shares his or her deep truth? That's gratitude for ya. There's how we think things "should" be, and how they really are. I'm far more interested in the latter.


*Quote above from Bridges' The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments.

Lost

A wonderful poem for any transition....

*****
Lost

Stand still.
The trees before you and the bushes beside you are
not lost.
Wherever you are is a place called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~David Wagoner

Get Out of Your Head . . .

I did a visualization today from a book called Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life, by Stephen C. Hayes. I haven't had much luck with this kind of exercise in the past. But you know how it goes: as an onion grows, you get more layers. This morning it was fruitful.

"Pick out one of the painful items you noted in your Suffering Inventory . . . Take a minute to get into experiential contact with it. Now in your mind's eye, put that painful item out on the floor in front of you, about four or five feet away. . . . When you get it out there, answer the following questions about it:

* If it had a color, what color would it be?
* If it had a size, how big would it be?
* If it had a shape, what shape would it be?
* If it had power, how much power would it have?
* If it had speed, how fast would it go?
* If it had a surface texture, what would it feel like?

The results created what the author calls a "pain creature." After reflecting on the results, I went to the next paragraph. "If you have a "sense of resistance, fighting, loathing, judgment, and so on about this pain creature, leave it out there . . . but move it off to the side. Now, find your sense of resistance [or whatever] and place it in front of you, next to the pain creature. When you get it out there, answer the same questions about it."

My first "pain creature," an imagined symbol of my lifelong depression, anxiety, and confusion (aka the Big Struggle) had come to me as a dark, gray, dense cube. Its outer texture was both fuzzy and bristly, like cheap stretchy fabric with prickly little pills. This was a coating or slipcover for the thing. When I pressed harder it felt solid underneath.

Since so many voices vie for top billing in my head, I knew a second visualization on resistance or judgment was in order. And this one made me weep. I discovered another pain creature who wanted to be recognized so badly that it appeared fully formed before I could even finish the questions. This white shorthaired dog, lean and robust with a black spot on its side, was barking madly at the gray cube - doing what dogs are supposed to do, with innocence, integrity and obedience to its character.

Instantly I knew that my resistance or judgment was not malevolent but a protective force, and one to be grateful for. Expecting a dog not to bark when it's bothered is unreasonable and disrespectful of the laws of nature. Especially since the barking will serve you when the situation warrants it. I could see that my depression or anxiety might be worsened, though, by being yapped at all the time by a protective energy that didn't understand. It seemed very apparent that these two "pain creatures" were entities in their own right who needed to be further known and respected - and not by left brain methods, which have formed the bulk of my psychological explorations over the years.

The dog came so naturally and quickly, I was reminded of a vision I had about a year ago - the only true waking "vision" I think I've ever had. More on that next time.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Order the PBS American Experience documentary on Eugene O'Neill, and watch the whole thing. The following passage has the most meaning when you know the story behind it. But it also stands alone. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

*****

Narrator:
In the climactic fourth act of Long Day's Journey Into Night, in one of the most beautiful and quietly moving passages O'Neill ever wrote, Edmund struggles to put into words the ephemeral sense of connection with something larger that had sometimes come over him while at sea.

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
I was on The Squarehead, square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free.

I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. . . I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself . . . To God, if you want to put it that way.

And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning.

[The following is said so wistfully, in such a quiet, understated way, that your eyes can't help but mist over.]

Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man. . . I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.

Robert Brustein:
Well, there's that beautiful moment in Long Day's Journey when Edmund begins to reflect on the time when he was at sea, and he found God, or what he thought was God in the quiet and the silence and the coming together of all the elements. And his father sits and wonders at this and says, "There's a touch of the poet in you." And he says, "No, I'm not a poet. I don't even have the makings."

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
No...I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. Well, it will be faithful realism at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

The strangeness continues

As I said below, everything shifted dramatically in my late 40s. I got more frustrated and restless about continuing on a path that was never rewarding to me in the first place. You know, the one where you go to school, get a career, get married, and live hunky-dorily ever after. I enjoyed work when I could stay engaged, but that was less and less as I got older. Barely able to sit still even at a temporary administrative job, I wondered what was wrong with me. Something indefinable had been calling me for many years, and was now screaming louder by drawing my energy and attention away with new insights and unusual experiences. At some point, trying to decipher my inner life became more important than whatever I was trying to maintain in the outer one. Though I had no idea where I was being led, I could no longer focus on the usual external demands.

One day at work, frustrated tears came to my eyes and I dashed to the (thankfully empty) lunchroom down the hall. A feeling welled up inside me with a physical intensity I didn't understand. Was this a new type of depression? It was a gray, dark winter, after all, and it had been for some time. Leaning against the bulletin board with tears streaming down my face, I suddenly felt the slightest glimmer of another presence. It seemed to be coming from within me. What is this? I thought, stopping in mid-sob. Who is this?

At first there was no answer, just the faintest sense that some kind of energy, with its own sentience, was trying to get my attention. Then, though it seemed beyond the rational, I discerned this new entity's voice along with its powerful inner presence. It's me. I listened for more, but that was all I heard. It's me.

"Oh," I stammered out loud, awed and perplexed. "Nice to meet you."

I collected myself and left the room feeling that something important had happened.

Not long afterward, I gave notice at work. Then, further unsettling my husband, I proposed that we move from our house so I could manage an apartment building. There, with part time responsibilities and no housing costs, I would have enough free energy to listen to what life was trying to tell me.

How it began...

Here's a recommendation for a blue morning: go to Yahoo News and find the photo of the day. More than likely it's something fascinating from some corner of the world that will either make you smile, think, or shake your head in wonder. This morning the page features a horned frog on top of a mini pumpkin at the Bronx Zoo, two of nature's marvelous offerings paired not for humorous effect but for "behavioral enrichment," says the zoo. Keepers look for ways to stimulate the animals "both mentally and physically." You could say this photo did the same for me.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos

And if we add up the impact of the next photo - John McCain caught in an unfortunate grimace behind Barack Obama; and the next, an impenetrable thicket of sailboats in the Barcelona regatta; and after that, a man with a chandelier-like mosaic of fruit stuck to his ceiling in preparation for a feast in Israel – well, it's probably worth getting out of bed each morning, just to have another facet of our amazing world revealed to us. This is life's greatest gift to humanity: to be able to sense and reflect on Earth's overwhelming bounty. Every day our personal world enlarges to encompass what we've seen, heard, tasted and felt. Granted, that may be more than one person's senses can handle, thanks or no thanks to technology. But if we set our filters for delight and surprise, the 'inbox' brings messages that can ease a tough day.

It is inevitable that you will experience at least one small thing today that interests you or makes you smile. These are your gifts for the day. Hang onto them for dear life, for during the toughest times they may be all we have.

Here's mine lately:

Birds I've never seen on the backyard feeder (cedar waxwings!)
Yorkshire Gold tea with cream and sugar
My neighbor's garden
Singing to a favorite song
The farmer's market
Stretching
Walking
Doodling
Sharing deep thoughts with a friend
Seeing the sun come out repeatedly on a cloudy day
Warm wind on my skin
Good eye contact with a stranger

I could list many more. And even though I struggle with depression (lifelong dysthymia), I consider the ability to list more a true blessing. The glass is always more than half full in my book. I'm one of the most optimistic people I know. What's the depression from, then? Damned if I know: exquisitely sensitive temperament and nervous system; difficult upbringing; blood sugar and other hormonal issues; astrological sign (Virgo with Libra Moon and Sagittarius rising); karma; all or none of the above. If I ever feel helpless or hopeless about anything, it's the ability to get out of this box, to punch or love or accept down the barriers that have kept me from doing much besides coping with wildly fluctuating emotions and moods. I'm a smart person. I've read the books and seen the therapists and practiced the visualizations and sat the meditation. I'm thoughtful and introspective to a fault. And until recently, I managed the moods well enough to have a job and a quiet social life and a reasonably "normal" existence.

All that changed in my late 40s.

Welcome!

Thanks for coming! I created this space as a container for things I've found helpful as I go through a difficult and confusing midlife transition. The material here may be useful for other types of changes too. So even if you're not "middle aged" - whatever that means these days - if you've stumbled across this, feel free to comment.

Primarily, I want to share some of the books, poems, thoughts and other things that have helped illuminate my own tricky midlife path. By no means am I "done" with my transition - at the time of this posting I'm 49 and still feeling around in the dark. (One could argue we do that our whole lives long.) But I sense that I may be at least halfway through this birth canal of sorts.

Put another way, I have confidence that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train.



********

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~David Whyte~