Let me always remember that I have never regretted getting on my bike and going for a long ride. Despite the sore crotch promised over the next few days, I am home now with a good sweat and an even-centeredness from endorphins.
I rode to Golden Gardens park, a popular city beach overrun in the summer with picnickers, boaters and special events. I went to the "secret" part of the beach, way down beyond the farthest end of the parking lot, where hardly anyone ever goes. There I propped up my bike and, shielded by lush foliage, laid on a bench in the shade, listening to the waves of Puget Sound splash on the shore. About 10 years ago they ripped out the parking lot that used to be here, and restored old wetlands. Now this corner of the park is home to wildlife of many types. Usually I count at least eight turtles, all kinds of birds, and sometimes a water mammal.
I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the bench. My muscles relaxed. A perfect breeze and - finally - late morning's appearance of the sun conspired to bring peace to my weary mind and body. Each time I opened my eyes something comforting crossed my vision: a bloated dragonfly racing with a butterfly, billowing white jibs on sailboats offshore, the play of light off water. It was a wistful, bittersweet feeling, the kind you get when visiting, say, Cape Cod after Labor Day. Mid August is to summer as Sunday is to the weekend. You no longer have the entire season ahead; the inevitable change is in the air.
On my way out of the wetland hideaway, I passed a young woman preparing for her wedding in the park. She was dressed in a creamy white short dress, nothing overly formal but still very bridal. On her feet were strappy flat white sandals, perfectly suited for the setting and the warming sun. "Big day!" I said, wheeling my bike past her. "I was an August bride too, seventeen years ago." Tears filled my eyes as I took in the late summer perfection around me. We both have our whole lives ahead of us.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Boardwalk or Baltic Avenue?
As I knew it must but hoped it wouldn't, the other shoe has dropped. It had to eventually – shoes come on and off with regularity. What did I expect? Like the odd weather lately in my typically wet city, with unremitting blue skies and no rain for months, the pattern changed a week ago: to all-day gray with still no precipitation, and clouds low enough to touch.
My mood is right there with the skies.
I suppose this is nature's way of saying, "Don't get used to anything!" And I, coming off a spectacular run of positive brain chemistry and events, have settled down into what feels like a winter funk. I noticed immediately the earlier sunsets once August was underway. Almost overnight the skies darkened an hour earlier. I notice this every August, and besides the change in the angle, intensity and length of light, it signals other adjustments. Evening bike rides must end sooner. Long strolls during the magic hour – the time photographers love called dusk – are limited to a fast-shrinking window of opportunity. Like every other cycle in the Universe, this is the beginning of a contraction, the opposite of Spring's expansion. A Rumi poem addresses this beautifully:
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you'd be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.
I must also remember that, as with an earthquake, I have no idea how long this perimenopause will last. There's no way to tell just where I am in the process of The Change, and how much the hormonal upheaval intensifies a lifelong pattern of blues. The spring and summer have been a gift, granting me several months of "up" – not mania, but contentment and joy that were present when I awoke and with me throughout the day. I made some major personal breakthroughs during this period, found a wonderful job, began to lose a few pounds. I thought I was finally "on my way."
And I suppose I still am. Perhaps this isn't a setback so much as a reminder of cycles. This one comes with baggage I 'm not used to: the frustration of being unable to read anything without increasingly strong glasses, a persistent brain fog that robs me of focus and concentration, a low-level fatigue that propels me to the bed for far too many hours on far too many days. Dizziness and headaches occur with increasing frequency. Not to mention dryness everywhere, in my eyes, my skin, my sex. The estrogen balance is askew, and will remain so. Though I have not had more than one or two mild hot flashes (knock on wood), I am probably at the difficult point of deciding whether to begin hormone replacement therapy. Every cell in my being says not to do it. But there are risks in that decision as well.
And so comes the other component of this stage of life: the knowledge that no matter what you do, you're falling apart. It's a recognition of mortality, made more difficult by multitudinous and conflicting opinions about how to stay healthy. It's as if nobody knows anything but generalizations, and yet we're all so different that those generalizations can be nearly useless.
(As a sidebar, the "medicalization" of society is a huge topic, surely a symptom of a deeper malaise. An inordinate amount of money and energy is spent on perfecting individual fitness and health. While health is not something to take for granted, hardly any of us put similar energy into addressing the other things that ail us, individually or culturally: lack of community, overwork, environmental health, poverty, etc.)
As I said in my earlier post, it feels like a return to adolescence, replete with confusion and growing pains of a different sort. It's amazing how you can be so clear, focused and purposeful one minute, and then feel like you've drawn the Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 card the next. Like the fortunes won and lost in Monopoly, though, it helps to remember something about this transitory and mysterious life, from a Buddhist perspective at least: no matter how much or little you have, it's all play money in the end.
My mood is right there with the skies.
I suppose this is nature's way of saying, "Don't get used to anything!" And I, coming off a spectacular run of positive brain chemistry and events, have settled down into what feels like a winter funk. I noticed immediately the earlier sunsets once August was underway. Almost overnight the skies darkened an hour earlier. I notice this every August, and besides the change in the angle, intensity and length of light, it signals other adjustments. Evening bike rides must end sooner. Long strolls during the magic hour – the time photographers love called dusk – are limited to a fast-shrinking window of opportunity. Like every other cycle in the Universe, this is the beginning of a contraction, the opposite of Spring's expansion. A Rumi poem addresses this beautifully:
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you'd be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.
I must also remember that, as with an earthquake, I have no idea how long this perimenopause will last. There's no way to tell just where I am in the process of The Change, and how much the hormonal upheaval intensifies a lifelong pattern of blues. The spring and summer have been a gift, granting me several months of "up" – not mania, but contentment and joy that were present when I awoke and with me throughout the day. I made some major personal breakthroughs during this period, found a wonderful job, began to lose a few pounds. I thought I was finally "on my way."
And I suppose I still am. Perhaps this isn't a setback so much as a reminder of cycles. This one comes with baggage I 'm not used to: the frustration of being unable to read anything without increasingly strong glasses, a persistent brain fog that robs me of focus and concentration, a low-level fatigue that propels me to the bed for far too many hours on far too many days. Dizziness and headaches occur with increasing frequency. Not to mention dryness everywhere, in my eyes, my skin, my sex. The estrogen balance is askew, and will remain so. Though I have not had more than one or two mild hot flashes (knock on wood), I am probably at the difficult point of deciding whether to begin hormone replacement therapy. Every cell in my being says not to do it. But there are risks in that decision as well.
And so comes the other component of this stage of life: the knowledge that no matter what you do, you're falling apart. It's a recognition of mortality, made more difficult by multitudinous and conflicting opinions about how to stay healthy. It's as if nobody knows anything but generalizations, and yet we're all so different that those generalizations can be nearly useless.
(As a sidebar, the "medicalization" of society is a huge topic, surely a symptom of a deeper malaise. An inordinate amount of money and energy is spent on perfecting individual fitness and health. While health is not something to take for granted, hardly any of us put similar energy into addressing the other things that ail us, individually or culturally: lack of community, overwork, environmental health, poverty, etc.)
As I said in my earlier post, it feels like a return to adolescence, replete with confusion and growing pains of a different sort. It's amazing how you can be so clear, focused and purposeful one minute, and then feel like you've drawn the Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 card the next. Like the fortunes won and lost in Monopoly, though, it helps to remember something about this transitory and mysterious life, from a Buddhist perspective at least: no matter how much or little you have, it's all play money in the end.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Who Are You Really?
One of the great themes of midlife is the burning question, "What are you going to be?" Not the way it's meant in high school, when guidance counselors, parents, and well-meaning others pressure you to pick a path before you're even half-baked. The question in middle age assumes you have spent the first part of your life pursuing what you thought was the right path – or a reasonable facsimile - and have now come to question not only your choices but your culture, your world, and the depths of your being. In other words, the very meaning of existence. You're either coming to recognize that you've been sold a bill of goods and it's not made you happy, or you've gotten a whiff of your mortality and it's reckoning time.
But how do you answer the question when you discover that paths already taken only reveal who you were? You might do as others do. Midlife is a time of affairs and broken marriages and uncharacteristic behaviors. Stories abound of spouses finding themselves (and ditching their partners) after years of faithfulness, of sudden excursions into cosmetic surgery, foreign countries, interests long forgotten, and other symbols of youth. This course of action is a double-edged sword. It attempts to meet the soul's need to put the ego in a more rightful place, which is a beautiful and vital task of midlife development. But it can also throw lives into utter chaos. Most people cherish norms, agreements and obligations above struggles for personal growth.
The pressure to act during this time enormous. Choices are often premature. The alternative, to sit with the discomfort and explore what it's really trying to tell us, is also not cherished in our culture. We are groomed to think of time in microprocessed minutes, to assume that broken things must be fixed (and the sooner the better), to impose our Western will on the intelligent rhythms of nature. We have no socially sanctioned process, much less concept, of exploring midlife malaise, any more than we have such rites of passage for adolescence and elderhood.
This is why some of us feel we are being drawn and quartered in middle age – because psychospiritually, we are. The urgent voice of the nascent and true Self can barely be heard above the din of voices imploring us to not change. To complicate matters, one of those imploring voices is our own.
And yet, approached with intention and consciousness, this often intense time can yield rewards beyond imagination. Jungian analyst Murray Stein writes, "When the unconscious erupts at midlife, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. Life still clings strongly to them. And actually the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention."
Who am I really? is a question for which the answers must be "lived into," to paraphrase the poet Rilke. Who are these neglected characters from our inner past? Last night, I dreamed my 80-year-old mother saw me painting on my hand. She looked reminiscent and sad. "A life in the arts," she murmured regretfully, "is not a bad thing." There's no question I put this part of myself aside after college, to meet the "necessities of life" as so many creative people must do. But that part I'm already conscious of. It's the other new voices that startle me: the one indignant at past and current suffering of certain fools; the other one who wants me to "brand" myself after all these years and present it to the world. Do I know what this is supposed to look like? Not really, not yet. It's an exploration. It's messy, it's a process, it's – well, it's half-baked, a return to the theme of adolescence.
In a sense, we get a do-over at midlife. It's almost like living out the fantasy of if only I knew then what I know now. It won't be perfect: our youthful bodies are gone, and practical worries can dominate our days. Avenues we'd hoped to travel may be re-routed through new parts of town. But one of the great joys of being off the map is the potential for discovery. If we are lucky, we become aware as we stumble and explore that despite our confusion, this mysterious life really does know what it's doing.
But how do you answer the question when you discover that paths already taken only reveal who you were? You might do as others do. Midlife is a time of affairs and broken marriages and uncharacteristic behaviors. Stories abound of spouses finding themselves (and ditching their partners) after years of faithfulness, of sudden excursions into cosmetic surgery, foreign countries, interests long forgotten, and other symbols of youth. This course of action is a double-edged sword. It attempts to meet the soul's need to put the ego in a more rightful place, which is a beautiful and vital task of midlife development. But it can also throw lives into utter chaos. Most people cherish norms, agreements and obligations above struggles for personal growth.
The pressure to act during this time enormous. Choices are often premature. The alternative, to sit with the discomfort and explore what it's really trying to tell us, is also not cherished in our culture. We are groomed to think of time in microprocessed minutes, to assume that broken things must be fixed (and the sooner the better), to impose our Western will on the intelligent rhythms of nature. We have no socially sanctioned process, much less concept, of exploring midlife malaise, any more than we have such rites of passage for adolescence and elderhood.
This is why some of us feel we are being drawn and quartered in middle age – because psychospiritually, we are. The urgent voice of the nascent and true Self can barely be heard above the din of voices imploring us to not change. To complicate matters, one of those imploring voices is our own.
And yet, approached with intention and consciousness, this often intense time can yield rewards beyond imagination. Jungian analyst Murray Stein writes, "When the unconscious erupts at midlife, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. Life still clings strongly to them. And actually the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention."
Who am I really? is a question for which the answers must be "lived into," to paraphrase the poet Rilke. Who are these neglected characters from our inner past? Last night, I dreamed my 80-year-old mother saw me painting on my hand. She looked reminiscent and sad. "A life in the arts," she murmured regretfully, "is not a bad thing." There's no question I put this part of myself aside after college, to meet the "necessities of life" as so many creative people must do. But that part I'm already conscious of. It's the other new voices that startle me: the one indignant at past and current suffering of certain fools; the other one who wants me to "brand" myself after all these years and present it to the world. Do I know what this is supposed to look like? Not really, not yet. It's an exploration. It's messy, it's a process, it's – well, it's half-baked, a return to the theme of adolescence.
In a sense, we get a do-over at midlife. It's almost like living out the fantasy of if only I knew then what I know now. It won't be perfect: our youthful bodies are gone, and practical worries can dominate our days. Avenues we'd hoped to travel may be re-routed through new parts of town. But one of the great joys of being off the map is the potential for discovery. If we are lucky, we become aware as we stumble and explore that despite our confusion, this mysterious life really does know what it's doing.
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