July | 2017 | Geneen Roth

Published July 29, 2017

My first teacher once held up a teacup …

and said, “See this? It’s already broken…” Then he went on to say that every form is fleeting and has an expiration date. Teacups will eventually get lost or broken. Flowers will too. So will people we love, and um, us too.

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.

Published July 27, 2017

I used to love drama. …

It made me feel alive, enthralled. And I remember, years ago, wondering what I would write about if it wasn’t about what was wrong and how to fix it (which was really, how to fix myself). I thought about the great writers and the great painters and how they were suffering and how that suffering provided grist for their art.

Today, as I was sitting at the kitchen table listening to the twitter of the hummingbirds and the sound of the fountain outside and not feeling moved to do anything or fix anyone, least of all myself, I was remembering my concern of long ago about the lack of drama. Calm meant boring.

Nothing is wrong these days. I don’t mean that there aren’t challenges (i.e., we’ve had a bit of a rodent problem in our house. Did you know that if a mouse can stick his nose in a hole the size of your pinky nail, he can crawl though that hole by collapsing his bones and reconstituting himself on the other side. Geez). Anyway, the rat people have been here quite a lot and besides them, there are the challenges of having a body, being in a relationship, being human here on earth school. And of course, there are the politicians. But in this moment, nothing is wrong. And when I refrain from the temptation of fixing and improving even for five minutes, I still have a rodent issue, my close friend is dying, my back aches, my cousin is in the middle of a messy divorce and nothing is wrong.

Out my window, the setting sun. The late afternoon magical light. The green of the trees. The bunch of sunflowers in the gold vase looking as if their purpose on earth is to delight anyone who cares to see them. Things are the way they are, and without my stories overlaid on top of them, there are challenges, but no problems. And so many sunflowers.

Published July 22, 2017

We saw the movie Me and Early and the Dying Girl …

a few nights ago on the recommendation of a friend who said it was one of her favorite movies. It was a tender, poignant movie about three high school friends but—spoiler alert—the narrator said early on in the film, in two or three different places, that the dying girl didn’t die. And then, at the end, she did. Aside from the fact that I felt the teeniest bit manipulated by being told a lie, I was so curious about what happens when the end—death—is taken off the table of imminent possibilities. Would I have watched the movie differently if I knew the dying girl was going to die?
I know it was just a movie, but since the inevitability of death has been an, um, obsession of mine since I was young, I’m wondering if I would have paid more attention to the dying girl, if I would have appreciated her quirkiness more if I’d known she was going to die.

And of course that makes me wonder about day-to-day life and how easy it is to forget the temporary nature of it all. And I wonder if, like the dying girl in the movie, I lived with death in mind—or as Don Juan said in the Castaneda books, with death over my shoulder—I too would appreciate every little thing, every quirkiness. Even as I write this, I ask myself what I am paying attention to now. Is it the sound of the keys clicking, is it the feeling of my feet on the floor, the trill of the one bird outside? Am I here or am I racing into what we’re going to do when I finish writing this. The future. My friend Catherine once said that we can’t have forever, but we can have eternity—if we are really present here, now. Because if I pay attention to the sound of the keys clicking and the coolness of the floor, then there is no past, there is no future, there is only this. And this. And this. I think that’s what Catherine meant by eternity.

Published July 18, 2017

I’ve been thinking about wanting recently …

—and all the things, people, life circumstances I wanted because (I believed) they would make me happy. This morning I remembered the antique garnet bracelet I saw in a window of an old shop in Greenwich Village when I was fourteen. It was so beautiful, so magical that I was convinced that having it would change my life. I suppose I thought that wearing it would, like fairy dust, sprinkle beauty on everything about me that wasn’t beautiful. Or maybe I thought that other people would look at it on my wrist and think, “Anyone who wears this is special. Is someone I want to know.” I wanted that bracelet to fill in the holes of anxiety and worthlessness. To give me value. To make me whole. A tall order for a few stones strung together…

After putting it on layaway for a year — it took three dollars a week of babysitting money and a teeny bit of help from my father — it was finally mine. And it was indeed beautiful and I did indeed enjoy wearing it for a little while, but it didn’t right what was wrong. And now it sits in an old jewelry box, where it has been keeping company with the many other It things I thought were going to change my life.

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.

Published July 14, 2017

It’s been thirty-one years since I met Matt. …

I don’t usually know things like this immediately, but within five minutes of our first date, I knew I was going to spend my life with him. Looking at his face everyday still feels like watching the sun come up (and this from the girl who was certain that she was "too much of a handful”--as my step-father described me--for anyone but unavailable men who weren’t attracted to me). During a fight near the beginning of our relationship, Matt grabbed an egg and cracked it over his head. Shocked (and gasping with laughter) at his willingness to interrupt the fight with egg dripping on his hair, face, and chin, I thought, “What a guy."

Published July 9, 2017

I either have toxic mold syndrome or am enlightened …

(i.e., disengaged from my familiar self). That’s what I thought this morning as I lay in bed. I haven’t slept more than a few hours for a few weeks, which (apparently) began after Matt and I stayed in a musty hotel room for a few nights during which neither of us slept well. No other symptoms except a nervous system that feels as if it’s plugged into an electric socket. It’s operating on a different frequency—almost like when I was addicted to amphetamines but without the buzz, the heart racing, the anxiety.

Maybe it’s mold-related. I’ll check that out with my doctor. And maybe it’s just a few weeks of not sleeping well (the effects that not sleeping has on the body/mind). Or maybe it really does have something to do with the effects of the everyday practice of sensing, looking, listening, bringing myself back a thousand times a day to what isn’t wrong. To the sound of the wind, the dappled light, the sip of tea. This foot, this bite, this face in front of me.

On the absolute level, it doesn’t matter whether it’s toxic mold or being lit from within. On the relative level, of course it matters because I/we need to take care of these physical forms and do what is necessary for them to thrive. We need these bodies to hear, taste, see, sense, love.

Here’s all I know now before talking to my doctor (and after doing research on toxic mold): I’m not sleeping well and my nervous system is functioning in a way that I don’t recognize.

Remember that story of the man and the helicopter? Here’s my version:
A man was standing in a house that was being flooded (Oy, talk about mold). He called out to God, “Save me, God, save me.” A rowboat came along. The woman rowing the oars said, “Come on, get in.” The soon-to-be drowning man said, “No, God is going to save me.” A little while later, as the house continued to fill with water, a cruise ship came along. The captain of the ship said, “We can help you get into our boat.” And the drowning man said, “Nope, God is going to save me.” Then a helicopter came along and the pilot saw the house, which was now filled to the top floor with water. The pilot called out to the drowning man, “I’ll send you a rope, climb up, and you’ll be safe.” And the drowning man said, “It’s God that’s going to save me, not a helicopter. I am going to wait for God.”

The man drowned and when he got to heaven, he said to God, “What happened? I believed in you and you let me drown!” God said, “Didn’t you notice that I sent you a rowboat, a cruise ship and a helicopter…”

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?

Published July 2, 2017

I keep wanting to write something deliciously profound …

to you all but I don’t have that much to say these days…

Except that these summer days are glorious. I wake up before 6 and lay in bed listening to the birds. They sound like diamonds sparking off bits of light every few seconds. After I rouse myself from the inbetween sleepy state of being no one to being someone, I realize: Oh, I woke up. It’s another morning on planet earth! Lucky me to still be breathing.

I look around the room—Matt is usually up and out in his office by then—and start taking in what I see. Color, shape. After that, the labels: Chandelier. Painting with girl and bird. Blue ceiling. I sense my body, right foot then up the leg. Left foot, left leg, all the while sensing the life force that is moving my blood, breathing me. Nothing is wrong as long as my mind doesn’t grab hold of what I didn’t do yesterday or need to do today. Nothing is wrong as long as I don’t pin myself to the wheel of correction, as a friend says. And nothing is wrong even when I do pin myself to that wheel, as long as I don’t think I shouldn’t be pinning myself to the wheel.

At some point in the morning, I pad my way outside. Foot on ground, body meets air. Oh, the air on the skin! I pass by flowers—have I seen them today? I notice the spiral succulent that looks like it’s from another planet. And the huge succulent that my friend Barbara says should have been in the Willy Wonka film because it seems like it should have chocolate between its leaves that you can slurp whenever you feel like it. (Am I noticing those as well?)

Then to my studio. And then to the book I am working on. Yippee. (It will be out in March. It doesn’t have a title yet.) Here’s a sentence I’ve been working on this morning in the chapter called Heavenly Bodies:

“Even if we spend ninety years treating these bodies magnificently, they will wear out and die. Yet as temporary, fragile and vulnerable as our bodies are, they are the most direct portals to the only forever there is.”

Heavenly indeed.

Published July 2, 2017

When I walked into my acupuncturist’s office …

the other day - an hour drive from my home - a man with the same-time appointment as me was already there. The acupuncturist asked why I was there and told me I didn’t have an appointment with him. He said there was “no way” he would have booked that day/time, as the man who was there flies across the country for his appointments, which he books months in advance. Then he told me that our appointment was a week from that day/time, and I’d made a mistake.

At home, I looked at my desk calendar and saw that I was going to be out of town on the day he said I made that appointment. I remembered conversing with him about the appointment that was mine that he didn’t think was mine; I had my calendar in front of me then as well. There is “no way” (I thought) that I’d make an appointment with him for a day when I was going to be away. You’re wrong, I said to him in my aggrieved mind. You owe me an apology. You double-booked yourself and now you’re blaming it on me. And anyway, why don’t you confirm your appointments in advance, by email or telephone? Do I have to do everything myself? How can you even call yourself a health practitioner, you irresponsible, lame-brained fuck up. And—I don’t like those Hawaiian shirts you wear.

Huff puff. Rant, rant. The reactive mind at work.

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.