Discovering New States of Being

1. It snowed all day yesterday. Not in a serious kind of way, but more as if point were atmospheric rather than accumulative. Maybe three or four inches of the fluffiest crystals landed around the Temple. Not a lot by Worcester standards. Still it was pretty and enough to have to do something about. The gasoline driven environmental polluter snow blowers which have saved my back and given me hours to sit inside instead of shoveling endlessly came out occasionally, but a couple quick passes with a snow shovel worked as well for most of the clean-up.

As this morning dawns, trees are laden and streets are white. It’s a lovely sight, this monochrome coating. As if some child was charged with whitewashing the world but only managed to get the topsides of things before she lost interest and moved onto something else. Vertical surfaces, tree trunks and sides of houses are their natural color while roofs and branch tops and sidewalks are all fluffy white.

2. I woke early this morning without much feeling. I always check, first thing, when I’m just beginning to know I am me, to see how I am doing. ‘What is the state of the Dave?’ as a friend of mine likes to inquire. I begin with bodily sensations, then go on to emotions and thoughts. It’s a fuzzy process as there is no specific moment when I’m asleep and then suddenly become awake. Some hazy process lies in between—a place where the snow of sleep is not deep or restricting but is still everywhere to be muddled and waded through before arriving definitively in the land of consensual reality.

3. The in-between places, the boundary places, the liminal places are the most interesting. And since nothing is really fixed or permanent, life is, essentially, only and always in-between. Though the words I use imply clear (and useful) distinctions, my actual experience is much more fluid, borderless and inclusive.

Awake is a state. Asleep is a state. Then there is the vast expanse of waking up and falling asleep. Even within awake and asleep, there are infinite variations. A friend has a watch that charts her sleep. She can read out the story of her night on her computer screen the next morning as a line of peaks and valleys with some plateaus along the way. I would suspect any measure of ‘awake’ would also have to include the sluggishness of the late afternoon and the arousals of various events and times of the day.

4. In the book HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE, Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case for emotions as complex constructions rather than fixed responses in regions of the brain that are triggered by outside events. Things don’t happen and ‘make us’ feel a certain way. We experience emotions based on the concepts and words we have learned. We interpret the signals we are receiving from the various parts of our body and make creative guesses about what it is and how we should respond. In order to appreciate the subtlety and variation of our emotions lives, Ms. Barrett encourages expanding our awareness of the particularity of our moment-to-moment experience, learning new words that describe specific emotional states, and even making up words that describe specific new states.

5. This morning, as I lay awake in my warm bed on a cold winter morning, I wasn’t particularly tired nor particularly anything at all as far as I could tell. I was just slightly reluctant to get out of bed even though I was looking forward to a quiet morning of writing, sipping tea and looking out the window at the new fallen snow.

I have decided that this feeling of slight to moderate disinclination to get out of bed should be called an instance of beddrag. (Pronounced as a combination of bed and drag with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Beddrag is the feeling of reluctance to exit the warm comfort of the horizontal life of dreaming and enter into the vertical exertions of daily life. It doesn’t refer to the dread of facing life again or the exhaustion that sometimes accompanies morning, but just that almost sweet disinclination to change state. Perhaps one might even experience some beddrag after reading a good book in a comfortable chair and then having to get up to get on with life.

Exploring with this new concept, we might even begin to distinguish different versions of beddrag based on the temperature in the room, whether one is sleeping in flannel or regular sheets, whether one sleeps alone or with a four-legged or two-legged partner(s). A whole new universe opens up with one word.

6. The morning light has fully arrived. Snow and icicles decorate the neighborhood. It’s quiet and cozy here on the couch looking out through the windows. I’ll just enjoy a few more moments of beddrag before I get up to go out to clear the front steps.

Waiting in Line

My partner and I are now waiting in line with millions of other Massachusetts residents aged 65 to 75 to get an appointment for the vaccination shots now ‘available’ to protect us from COVID-19. Our official eligibility began yesterday. I dutifully switched on my computer at five a.m. when I first got up, naively thinking I might be ahead of the rush. The web site crashed several times over the first two minutes I was on. Apparently I was not the only baby boomer up early to catch the worm.

We baby-boomers are a fairly entitled generation. Born between 1946 and 1956, we grew up in America’s post-war boom of jobs, houses and optimism but also remember hiding under our desks in elementary school to ‘practice’ for the looming nuclear war. We came into adulthood with soaring rates of college attendance, the Vietnam war, Woodstock, and LSD. Some of us thought we were going to change the world from the sordid commercially driven oppressive social structure it was to a utopia of peace and love. The adults of our country had made a mess of things and we were sure we were just the ones to correct the wrongs and live into the dawning age of peace and love.

Many of my friends in college had long hair and we were suspicious of anyone who was over 30 or wore a tie. We were arrogant, innocent and incredibly hopeful. But, after often circuitous routes, most of us became lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, insurance agents, artists and members of the professional class of power and privilege. I too eventually got a full-time job and wore a tie and joined the local Rotary Club.

A close friend, just a year older than me, became (along with millions others) a Trump supporter, perhaps seeing in his anti-establishment authoritarian message a new hope for what we had dreamed of fifty years ago. The age of Aquarius has certainly slipped through of our grasp. Though we have all done the best we could, the crises of environmental degradation, economic oppression, and institutional racial injustice seem worse than when we came into adulthood.

But however my generation has failed or succeeded, I still wanted to get a vaccine. On and off yesterday, I dutifully went to the web site to find an appointment. The site mostly crashed, though occasionally I got messages that some appointments were available in scattered locations across the state. For twenty tantalizing minutes there were three spaces available at a site down the street at Worcester State College for Saturday afternoon. They eventually disappeared. My efforts were slightly frustrating and ultimately fruitless. But not unexpected.

So I’m thinking this morning about the spiritual virtue of patience, the third of the six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism. One writer describes the paramitas as the ‘bases of training’ for those of us wanting to wake up to the fullness of life. (The other paramitas are: generosity, discipline, effort, meditation, and wisdom.)

I suspect, if I am disciplined in my effort, I will eventually get an appointment. In the meantime, I’d rather not disturb myself by feeling righteously entitled, anxious, left out, or angry. All those are possible and perhaps inevitable, but this might also be an excellent time to practice ksanti: tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance and patience.

I’ll be interested to see how well my plan works out.

Profession of Love

Maybe he was inspired by Valentine’s Day. Maybe because I hadn’t seen him for a while, I’ll never know. But he finally said it to me. I know he’s felt it for a long time, but until yesterday he hadn’t managed to say the words. It’s funny what a difference it can make when someone finally finds the words. You may know they care about you, you may know you’re in a serious relationship, but until the words ‘I love you’ are spoken, something is missing.

We were just hanging out. It was the late afternoon and we were sitting across from each other drawing on the large white board that covered the whole surface of the small table between us. We were so focused on our lines and colors, so physically engaged by our co-creation that sometimes our heads would nearly touch as we leaned in to fill the white space. He was into large and quickly repeated purple circles. I was focusing more on smaller orange and red highlights. We would draw with our erasable crayons for a while, then he would decide it was time to clean the board. I let him take the lead.

He began to notice that the color trails left by the crayons on the board would actually color the damp paper towel that he used for erasing. I suspected, as he vigorously wiped away lines and images, that he was investigating the transitory nature of life as well as the surprising possibilities of the conservation of matter. I myself was pondering the de Kooning drawing that Rauschenberg erased in 1953 and is still on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We kept our thoughts to ourselves and I wondered if our erased white board was perhaps the best display of the ocean of feelings between the two of us. But I digress.

I was singing softly as I drew. Sometimes I would stop and he would happily demonstrate his knowledge by filling in a word or two. For some reason, I was inspired to render a very slow version of that perennial classic ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ Other people were in the living room with us, but they were reading or computing or doing something. ‘Up above the world so high.’ In my mind, our simple activity filled the universe, drawing and singing and being together. ‘Like a diamond in the sky.’ Of course we are not special, thousands and millions of humans are enacting this ancient drama of care and creation at each moment, yet the mystery and preciousness of it all. ‘How I wonder what you are.’

I finished and paused and looked at my grandson—a small miracle of universal proportions. In the silence, he looked up at me and said ‘I love you.’ Softly. And I said, ‘I love you too.’ Softy.

Having spoken our truths and exposed our deepest feelings, we went back to drawing and erasing and singing as if nothing had happened—as if we had not both been forever changed by this one passing and indelible moment.

Three Essential Skills     

Life is essentially unworkable. Impossible stuff happens. No matter how smart or how wise or how lucky you are, things will not always go your way. Failure, loss and suffering are inevitable. Clarity of purpose will come and go. Confusion, anxiety and despair will be occasional or frequent companions. Important things like relationships, plans and your body are guaranteed to break down.

None of this is a problem that can be solved, it’s just how life is.   Like my friend, an Episcopal priest, once said: sin (missing the mark/imperfection/forgetting) is not an issue to be fixed, it’s just a condition to work with. So how do we meet this life (and ourselves) that cannot be fully fixed?  What skills are helpful in the face of the full catastrophe of life? Here are three fairly durable skills that I have found useful in the face of it all:

#1 Staying – In difficult situations, most of us want to fix, ignore or get away from whatever it is. None of us like to be uncomfortable for very long. When things and situations can be fixed or straightened out or clarified, I’m all for it. Fix it if you can and move on. Likewise, ignoring difficulty is a terrific skill to have. Sometimes avoidance is simply the best option available—at least for a time. And there are some situations that are so toxic, or violent, or dangerous that leaving is the appropriate, compassionate and wise thing to do.

But when none of these three strategies work—when it’s important not to leave and you can’t fix it and can’t ignore it—STAYING is a powerful strategy. Staying means choosing to remain in the middle of the impossibility of the situation without a plan. This is not the same as physically remaining present while you escape to distant regions in your mind. Staying is the practice of choosing to be present even after all your good plans and strategies have crumbled to the ground. Staying means being alive to your own feelings, thoughts and sensations as well as to the presence, thoughts and words of the others who are there with you (either in person or in your heart).

#2 Doing Nothing – This is a subset of Staying. Doing nothing is a good option only after you have tried everything else. Many daily problems can be resolved by improved communication, working together and being reasonable. But the big ones that appear in our lives often don’t yield to these common-sense strategies. The only way to know what kind of a problem you are dealing with is to do your best to work it out using the rational skills at your disposal. When these don’t work (and I guarantee there will be times when they don’t) your next best option is to Stay and Do Nothing.

This doing nothing is not the same as spacing out and is not to be confused with not caring. Doing Nothing is an active intention to be present without manipulation. Not running away, not fixing. Being alive and aware, but giving up the delusion that it’s all up to you. You become an interested and intimate participant in something that is happening through you and everyone involved in the situation. You give up your pretense of control and stay to learn and be transformed.

#3 Following – Following is a shift from trying to lead a situation in the direction you think it should go, to a willingness to stay with what is unfolding moment by moment. True following usually is only possible when we have given up our delusion that our perspective and our solution are the best way. True following comes only after the failure of all our usual success strategies—after we have been as wise and clear and strong and direct as we can and it has not worked.

Following then means to turn our attention to the unworkable situation itself, not to fix it or even to move it forward, but rather to notice and be present with what is already going on. Following means being curious about what is here in this impossible place. We begin to listen for what we have not yet heard and look for what we have not yet seen. Then we practice going along with whatever is arising.

These three seemingly simple skills can be useful reminders in almost any situation. If you’re interested, you might want to try practicing these skills today. In the next even slightly uncomfortable situation you notice, see what happens is you simply stay, do nothing and follow what is unfolding. It might be quite interesting.

Frozen In Place

A light winter rain falls from the night sky as a thin sheet of ice ominously thickens here below. Not flat like a lake, but ice shaped to every sidewalk and tree and leaf. Perfectly encasing every fence, car and house. Life sheathed in ice.

We once sat a Zen retreat through an ice storm. The rain fell through the night as we sat. We lost power and sat in the dark with candles and blankets. The next morning the temperature dropped and a brilliant sun sparkled on the nearby forest of thickly iced trees. Our quiet meditation that winter morning was punctuated by an occasional ferocious crashing. Huge branches and whole trees gave way under the terrible weight of their transparent burdens. Tree limbs and ice gave way together, shattering our silence momentarily and then quickly finding their new tangled and broken rest.

There was nothing we could do. We kept on sitting. I still remember.

Now I wonder at how each of us can become encased in the transparent shell of our selves. The accretion of who we are and what we do, under certain circumstances, grows so thick we strain to move under the weight and restriction of it all. Frozen in familiar positions of defensive complaint, we may suddenly discover nothing else is possible. Suddenly immobile when the temperature drops, we await our still fate. Will we break before the warmth comes back? Some fall around us, broken by the weight of life or suffocated still in place. Will we loose limbs and survive disfigured or fall entirely? Or nothing at all?

The cold rain falls darkly and the clock ticks for all of us. Sometimes it is like this, these trials, these frozen sentences. Without choice, we hold still and await the outcome. No one is to blame. Sometimes it is just like this.