Geneen Roth

It’s hard to take that in. It’s hard to actually believe that everything that looks so solid is actually temporary, or, if you do believe it, what to do about it. Sometimes I am so aware of the temporariness of life — that Matt will die, that Izzy will get old in five minutes, that I am already older than I was last year, not to mention ten or twenty years ago. The other day I read an interview with a woman’s health doctor and she defined mid-life as being between 45-65 years old. Oy, I thought. Where does that leave me? Have I officially, with my next birthday, entered old age? (And if I have, oh well. What a glorious old age this is!)

But anyway. This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about Liz Smith, the once-famous gossip columnist, who is now 94 years old.

“I am in search of Liz Smith,” she says. “After a lifetime of fun and excitement and money and feeling important and being in the thick of it, I am just shocked every day that I’m not the same person. I think that happens to all old people. They’re searching for a glimmer of what they call their real self. They’re boring, mostly.

“I’m always thinking falsely, expending what little energy I have, believing every day I may just rediscover that person. I try to be all of the things I was, but it inevitably fails. I don’t feel like myself at all.”

And I thought, “But but but: Liz, you’re alive. You’re breathing. You have another day on planet earth. Think of all the people – two hundred thousand of them - who died yesterday who would have willingly changed places with you for the chance to take another breath, witness a sunrise, see their children one more time.”

And - I had a lot of compassion for her, for all of us, who keep thinking that the past was better, and that if only we could go back, recreate a moment, an era, a particular age, life would be grand. (Some of us don’t want to go back but we keep waiting for the future when everything will be great. Same thing. Past/future: stories in our minds).

It’s hopeless. It’s crazy-making. It’s like me wanting to go back to when I was sixteen, in that white voile dress with the black lace detail. Or to the time I met Matt and we took that walk on the beach in Santa Cruz near Surf Sushi. Or last year, when we saw the whales. Or last week when we saw the white egrets and before we found out that our friend was dying of cancer. Wanting to go back to anytime at all is the same as saying, “No. Not here. Not now. I don’t like it. Take me out of the only thing I actually have, the only thing that’s real: the present moment.”

Part of the deal of having a body is that like teacups, they are physical forms. They get old. Sometimes they break. None of us are the same as we were last year. And it’s never too late to pay attention to that. To be aware of what it’s like now, at this moment, here. Because whatever story you tell yourself about those days, that time, you are leaving out the details. What it felt like to be sick then. Or be lonely. And even if it was one hundred percent positive (which is unlikely), it doesn’t matter because it’s gone, over, kaput. Can’t go back.

In that same Liz Smith article, she says of the apparently fabulous past, “I was always climbing, burning up with ambition…” which of course makes me wonder if climbing means having your sights set on where you want to go to the exclusion of where you are now. If burning with ambition meant that she was so focused on what was going to happen when she got where she wanted to go that she missed the little things that were happening along the way.

In being so focused on the future, we train our minds to not notice the present. And when we get to where we thought happiness was waiting for us, we haven’t learned to take it in, notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to be ahead of ourselves. To want and not to have.

The real question is: Now what? If we can’t go back and the future isn’t here, what do we do? We pay attention.

I know, I know: Attention sounds like such a meager antidote for longing for the past or believing that the future is where your life will truly begin. But attention is everything. Attention to what you do have, not what you don’t. To what you can find, not what you lost. To what you have enough of, not what you lack. Attention to this breath, this sip of tea, this day, this night. These stars, this crooked smile, this moment.

Even if you are tired, even if you are sick with the flu or your back aches, there is still a part of you that can show up to this breath, this sensation in your right foot, the chirp of this bird. There is a lavish, riotous world in here and out there if you take even a minute away from the noise in your mind to notice it.

In this way, with even the barest of attention (and really what do you have to lose by doing this?), if you are fortunate enough to get to be ninety-four, you won’t have missed what was in front of you because you were so busy looking ahead of you or trying to recapture what has already passed.

These are the good old days. Don’t miss them.

In addition to actual physical things — earrings or sweaters or boots — there were people I met who seemed as if life had touched them with radiance and to whom I was drawn, convinced that I too could have radiance - by association. There were of course, a string of men who didn’t want me, places I wanted to live, the thigh-size I wanted to have, the weight at which I was convinced I’d be happy.

Two things have been occurring to me recently about wanting: the first is that it isn’t and it’s never been the actual getting of the thing/accomplishment that relieves the pressure inside. It’s that in the moment I buy or get or have it, that wild restlessness, that anxiety for the next thing and the next, is stilled. The waiting to finally hit the mark is over. The belief that I am not enough or that I need what I don’t have is at peace. And for one moment or five minutes or two weeks, before it starts focusing its yearning on something else, there is a sense of calmness. Of rest.

All those years of bingeing and the drama around food were exactly the same: the craving, the getting/eating, and the fallout afterwards. Food was my universe. And after spending so much time judging and blaming myself and still wanting the cupcake and then fighting with myself about yes, no, should, shouldn’t, bad, good, shame, shame — the moment of finally deciding to eat and taking that first bite was like being set free. But it wasn’t exactly the taste of the cupcake (although it was that too), it was in that first bite, all that internal gnashing came to an end. It was quiet inside. (Until of course the shame kicked up and then I was back in the battle). So, although it seemed that the war was about wanting food, it was also and perhaps mostly about wanting to be free from the internal war. From self-hatred. From believing at my core that I was worthless.

The second thing I’ve been thinking about is that it’s me who grants the power to these things. It’s me who invests magic onto the garnet bracelet. Onto men or women or life situations. It’s my power — and my projection of that power onto what’s out there.

Here’s what I know: there has never been a thing out there — a piece of jewelry, a sweater, a man, an accomplishment — that can give me back the light I so willingly disown. If that garnet bracelet was really magic, it would still be magic. If any one of those things—and we’ve all had hundreds of them and once we get that one, well, then we can stop—had the power, it would have stopped me in my tracks. We keep getting caught by the wanting and the belief that this one, this person, this weight will do it, be it.

And what I know to do is to tell the truth. To ask myself what I actually wanted when I wanted that garnet necklace or thinner thighs or the love of the man who wasn’t attracted to me. And to ask myself what I discovered on the other side of having them.

Telling the truth means turning around. In my own life, it’s meant first being tender towards whatever felt so unmagical in me, so powerless that I kept thinking that having that accomplishment or her friendship or his love would fill the hole. And then, as I once did with food and my weight, to be aware of the power that is already mine. To sense my body, its life force, what has never been affected by any thought or feeling or garnet bracelet. To be (as we all are) the source of the light instead of believing that what that light falls on is the answer.

What I hear in this story today is that we keep holding on to our thoughts of what is happening and what needs to happen, and this obscures the facts.

We ignore simplicity for fabrication.

We ignore the facts for drama about them.

And the “we” I am speaking of here is the mind--both our individual and collective minds--not the essential I.

The practice of returning to what we know, sense, directly experience while disengaging from the wild, scary, amped up stories of our minds is rigorous. But (IMHO) it’s the main practice because it makes room for everything else. For fear about toxic mold (my mind loves the thought of having something to get scared about) or for the possibility that light is raining down on this body, this room, this life.

Either way, toxic mold or raining light, there is a presence in me/us that holds both. That has room for an everyday-crazy mind and for being lavished with light. Like the blank screen in a movie theater that is unaffected by images of drama or comedy, we have the ability to hold, to notice, to be tender towards and amused by the passing show. To take action when it is necessary. To take care of these physical forms. To get caught up in the drama and then to return to what is untouched by it.  It seems to me that our daily challenges—frictions with others, worry about our kids, sickness, sleeplessness-- are our rowboats, our cruise ships, our helicopters. Do we keep waiting to be saved and drown in our fear-based stories or use them to climb to the sky of ourselves?

By the next day, there was a teeny crack in my self-righteousness. I realized that it was impossible to figure out whodunit. Maybe it really was me. Maybe I wrote it down wrong. But I still secretly believed it was him and I wanted payback: a session for free. Flowers. Mea culpas. Prostrating at my feet and asking for forgiveness. Like that.

By this morning (the next day after the next day), when Matt and I were talking, I heard myself getting on the “I’m right-you’re wrong” horse. The need to defend myself. The need to be right. The way being right scratches the itch of that poor little self who is flailing around trying to look good, be smart, prove to anyone who wants to listen how right she is about anything, everything. (Its favorite phrase is: You’re the one who…)

And then I started asking myself what being right (and someone else being wrong) does to my body. How it feels in my chest. My nervous system.

The answers: My heart hardens. The other is my enemy. My blood races, my nervous system is on high alert. Brittleness abounds. It’s me against the world. Everyone who has ever done anything to me that I didn’t like, anyone who has ever hurt me, rejected me, didn’t chose me, funnels into now.

The short answer: it feels awful.

For a long time, I didn’t realize it felt awful. Even the other day, as I was huffing and puffing about the missed appointment, it didn’t occur to me that I was causing myself pain. Being right used to feel so good. I felt as if I had to fight back. My life depended on it. It felt like I was speaking up for myself, telling the truth, not letting myself get pushed around. Letting go of my position felt like falling off a cliff to which I’d been hanging by my fingernails.

There are the facts: the acupuncturist had another appointment at the same time as “mine.” A double-booking occurred. He couldn’t see both of us. I drove home. The whole shebang took a few hours, not to mention—I can’t even begin to figure that out—the ranting time.

Now what? Do I replay the story again and again? Think of what I should have said to him? Will say to him? Demand an apology (for something he is convinced he didn’t do)? What purpose will be served by my insistence on being right?

If my priority is ease, relaxation or an open heart, if I want to climb out of the ranting mind, here are my choices: I can ask him to have automatic email confirmations. I can decide to stop seeing him so that this doesn’t happen again. I can decide to confirm my appointments with him in advance.

But before all this, there is a turn without which the rest is just blather: the willingness to turn towards that little tough fighter part of myself with tenderness. It got me this far—I survived--and that’s good. Now it can put down the sword because there’s a bigger girl in town: presence itself. That which can hold the fighter-girl.

In love and with tenderness, anything can dissolve because love is all it ever wanted anyway. With love and without judgment or blaming myself for being self-righteous, I can let my insistence on being right dissolve. (As long as I blame myself for ranting or calling him a fuck-up, even in my own mind, I pick up the right/wrong sword again, but now it’s internalized. I start fighting with myself.)

Without that (external or internal) fight, what’s left?

Answer: No huff, no puff, no rant. No positions. Nothing to defend. The willingness to see that, as my friend the contractor says, “Shit happens. Mistakes get made.” And in this case, the worst that happened is that I spent a few hours driving on a bright summer day.

What else is here? A soft heart. A relaxed nervous system. Open space like a cloudless sky. And although many people would consider that nothing, it sort of feels like everything I ever wanted.