These days, I reserve the word grateful for those things that bring a stab of pain to my heart as it overfills. If you find a pop tart left behind in your pantry by your ravenous kids you might feel a small rush of glee contemplating how you get to eat it, but that is not gratitude. If, however, you find that pop tart hidden behind some rubble in your post-apocalyptic home, where you have been starving for a week, you might instead experience that overwhelming tidal wave of joy, relief, thankfulness and humility that is gratitude.
photo by Gregory Mancuso; see gregorymancuso.com
I have many things in my life that blow me down with gratitude when I think about them. At 54, seeing all the disease and infirmities around me, I am practically in tears contemplating how I have thus far remained healthy and strong. And just a week ago, I was hanging out with both my kids, during their college winter breaks, when it dawned on me that they are my greatest accomplishment. I’ll happily share the glory for that accomplishment with their father, for there is more than enough to go around. It hit me, watching them riff jokes off something on the television, displaying their quick humor, their intelligence and warmth, their affection for each other and various other aspects of their personalities, that I really didn’t need to accomplish another single thing in my life in order to feel that my time on Earth served its purpose. For how could I achieve anything greater than creating these two extraordinarily wonderful people? Watching them there, I felt the gratitude coming along full bore, building and building, until it crashed over me, leaving me blubbering like a baby. They will tell you. I really was blubbering.
section from photo by Anton Jankovoy; see jankovoy.com
Standing here in the temporary desert of my own personal post-apocalyptic world, another thing that flattens me low with gratitude is the fact that I have loved with abandon, not once, but four times. Four times! That’s crazy! But true. This isn’t me mistaking for the real thing the times that I was merely infatuated or just out for sex or trying so hard to love someone I just couldn’t. I actually loved with abandon four times. I spoke uninhibited words to my lovers, purely, without agenda. I cared deeply how their family histories, their fears and triumphs, and their dreams shaped who they were. I wanted them to soar, and be everything they wanted to be. I looked right into their eyes and revealed myself. So, it matters not if I end up alone in my old age. I have seen the mountaintop. And in at least two of the cases, I actually stood on the mountaintop; I was loved with abandon in return. And the wave that tumbles me when I think about that is still a rush and a humbling.
Something happens to us adults as we maneuver the scary social complexities of society. We grow ever more hard-boiled, ever more guarded, every more cynical and ever more bitter. We forget all that we have to be dizzyingly grateful for. And we forget how to love with abandon. We sneer at it as folly. A recipe for disaster. And risking that much exposure and surrender often leads to terrible heartache, it’s true. It came to that for me in all four cases. So we hover nervously when we see our children take those risks, talking them out of it and predicting doom in our desire to protect them. But oh! That sublime feeling, when you surpass your boundaries, and lay yourself bare, there is nothing more thrilling, more alive, more beautiful. How could we not want that for our children? How is it that we focus on the downfall instead of the loft? I tell my daughter I am so, so happy for her that she has achieved love with abandon. For she has something for which she can be forever grateful, something she will always keep, no matter what happens. And you do. You keep it always.
photo by Andrea McChesney; found at iheartfaces.com
The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so much a part of our popular culture that virtually everyone knows its key premise, without ever having read it, or even knowing who wrote it (Robert Louis Stevenson). For some reason (I’m guessing insanity), Jekyll wants to segregate the selfish, depraved and conscience-free half of his nature from his altruistic, civil and dutiful side. He dreams of how wonderful it would be if each half could function without inhibition, free from the influence of the other. Sounds to me like a rationalization to let the dark side go nuts. Jekyll invents a potion to achieve the schism, the actual scientific means by which he accomplishes this left a mystery to the reader. After Jekyll drinks the foul brew, hideous, corporeal Hyde begins to roam the night. Unrestrained by the goodness and civility of Jekyll, Hyde not only degenerates into a murderous fiend, but becomes harder and harder to control. A cautionary tale, indeed.
Well, it turns out that I too have a “screw that!” conscience-free side to my personality, though thankfully she is neither villain nor murderous fiend. I have decided to call her “Estelle.” The most subversive thing Estelle ever did was to buy the loudly ticking antique pendulum clock that is now hanging just to the left of our family room television, despite knowing darn well that the men in the household didn’t want anything distracting from their view of whatever sports game or movie was on, let alone something that made noise and moved. She may also have had a hand in my apparently sudden decision, while accompanying my daughter to a piercing shop, to get a nose stud at age 52 (C’mon! You’ve wanted one for YEARS, you gutless suburbanite!), but I’m not sure about that one.
found at bokehphotography.uk.com
Estelle isn’t out to make trouble. She is just the morality-free, propriety-free, completely selfish truth teller who has finally learned how to jab her way forward to “keep things real.” She tells it like it is… loudly. Indeed, the longer I pretend not to hear her, the louder she gets. Like that ticking clock she insists “Oh yeah? Well here I am! Get used to it!” I first came to know her in the wee hours, when she’d awaken me in the dark, hoarsely whispering to me about how I’d been on autopilot for much of my adult life, navigating according to values or standards that never quite fit me. About how, as a result, the current configuration of my life was suffocating me. About how for years I’d been a pretender in my marriage, my own home, to my family and friends, trying to convince everyone and myself that I was happy.
My inner truth-teller, Estelle
Naturally, at first, Estelle frightened me, and I tried to hush her up. But she wouldn’t relent. Estelle was the first one to tell me that there was no way I could pull off preppy, country club clothing. (With those bazooms and that unmistakably Semitic visage??) To flat out say that I’d never be friends with the women in my synagogue’s Sisterhood so why did I keep trying (You don’t even like them!!). To pester me into admitting out loud that I had developed somewhat of a drinking problem. Nothing gets by Estelle. Her inconvenient and sometimes painful truths are often disruptive, but they are always liberating, even if at times anti-social. For example, Estelle helps me understand that when I nagged everyone in my family not to eat potato chips from the bag, it was really just because I resented being the only one who cared about a clean sofa or being the one left with the broken, saliva encrusted detritus at the bottom of the bag, but now that I have the house to myself, I too can happily jam my hand into the bag, cram chips in my mouth and lick my fingers, all while watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes at an unsustainably loud volume on the surround sound. Estelle says, “This is awesome!”
But while I am thankful that Estelle keeps me honest and helps me cast off the “supposed to’s” that dull, dishearten or, worse, crush me, I have realized that, of course, Stevenson is right. Even when it comes to my loud-no-bullshit-can’t-help-but-love-her Estelle, free reign would be a disaster. She must remain an internal force, a passenger on my crowded bus of characters. There will be no potion taking for me. For though she keeps the constructs of others from making me miserable, Estelle unleashed would be a misery to everyone else. She is blunt, inconsiderate, obnoxious, unintentionally but unsparingly hurtful. I learned this when, over the last two years or so she began taking more liberties, perhaps giddy with her vindication that she had been right about so many things.
On one such occasion, my daughter and I had just concluded a long, overwrought argument in a restaurant, my husband and son trying desperately to act like they weren’t with us, even though we were all at the same table. It finally seemed like my family would be able to move on to a nice dinner; peace and harmony had been thrown up in the air, but were once again beginning to settle on us like a blanket. Nevertheless, upon hearing the last half-hearted diss my daughter flung at me, which ordinarily I would have easily ignored for the greater good, Estelle came roaring forth. I found myself actually snorting and loudly muttering, in the most unmotherly way imaginable, “Give me a break.” Fortunately, all at the table, including my daughter, were so astonished at this aberration, the complete abandon of such a declaration, its sheer reckless nerve, that everyone started laughing and dinner was saved. But in another surfacing of Estelle, I wasn’t so lucky. My son was fervently and sincerely, if a just a wee bit sanctimoniously, trying to explain why something had mattered to him, and Estelle burst free, changing my aspect so completely that she was virtually corporeal like Hyde. Momentarily whisking me to some far away place, where she apparently knew I’d secretly rather be, she blithely sighed, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” in an absent-minded, sing song kind of way. My son and I were both shocked. We had just seen and heard something or someone that wasn’t at all the entity usually in charge, and this force, whatever it was, was completely unconcerned with his feelings. Estelle, it seems, doesn’t give a good goddamn about anyone but me. My son told me it was probably the coldest, and therefore the most hurtful thing I had ever done or said to him, and I could see why. Yow.
Poor Estelle! She only wants me to remain true to myself. She champions my causes. But she has indeed led me to hurt people I love when I’ve let her steer the bus. She takes me to the other extreme. So, to actually remain true to myself, my entire self, I’ll take her under advisement, but negotiate compromise and find my center. Thanks Estelle! Now, will you shut up?
My son told me recently about a driving “adventure” that he and his buddy went on. The rules of the adventure were this: you drive straight ahead until you reach a T intersection, and then you have to turn right. You continue on straight, or making right turns, until you can go no further. While I was digesting the idea that, only by pure dumb luck I didn’t get a call from Chicago, or Terre Haute, telling me not to worry, they’d be back the next day, my son related with relish and a bit of cackling glee how they ended up in what could be described as the slums of Danbury, CT, a mere 35 minutes away, in a dead end by some housing projects. “Why always a right turn?” I asked him.
“It’s easier,” he said, with a look that said, “D-uh!”
I had reason to think of this driving game again when my friend Diane told me about her current heartache. She had met a man on the west coast when she was out visiting her grown daughter, and their chemistry had been immediate. Apparently, they lit each other up, body and soul, like a generator plant on the New Jersey Turnpike. Because she’d go out 2 times a year to visit, she was able to spend extended time with this man, and they fell deeply and madly in love. Skype and phone calls carried them between visits. After a few years, the time had come when they began contemplating combining their lives, but because both of them had strong family, social, professional, even soulful ties to their own communities 3000 miles apart, they faced some tricky obstacles. They had started talking happily and dreamily about splitting their time on each coast, assuming they could find the way to make their professional activities more portable. While Diane had no friends or community connections on the west, her daughter was there, and she looked forward to the adventure of gaining new friends and activities there. And she would still be spending plenty of time with her family and friends on the east. Her man had both family and siblings on the east, and his kids on the west were virtually grown, ready for their own adventures. Nevertheless, this great love of her life seemed to be balking, talking with anxiety and dread about the huge changes necessary for them to be together on a day-to-day basis. He thought he’d be able to carry most of his work with him, but what if he couldn’t? What if he missed his much larger social circle on the west too much? What if he hated living on the east coast, with its gray cities and variable weather? What if, to accommodate him, she ended up spending more time on the west and began resenting him? What if their projected net worth as a pair really wouldn’t be enough to sustain the kind of lives to which they were accustomed or the resulting travel costs? Diane began feeling hurt. Based on what she understood, these possibilities did not seem likely. And wasn’t their love worth the changes? Wouldn’t the day-to day-joy of being together make everything else seem manageable? Fun, even? She wondered if he had just been indulging in a dream of love, one that evaporated when compromise became necessary, while she had been committing her heart.
“It’s not that,” I told her. “He’s just afraid to make a left turn.”
“Huh?” was her response, but I saw from her face that she could already sort of grasp where I was going.
“Diane,” I said, “this is probably the first left turn this guy has made in about 25 or 30 years.”
Dick Grossberg – CD Clocks
Despite the rules of my son’s driving game, young people make left turns all the time at the craziest intersections. They deliberately put on their left signal, having possibly decided at the last minute that’s where they want to go. They move out in the middle of the intersection with all the attendant risks, and nimbly or not so nimbly make it happen. Sometimes with bravado and confidence, sometimes with elevated heart rate, drawing in breath through clenched teeth or muttering “fuck” under their breath, but they make it. They follow a college sweetheart to a new city, a new country even, with no real plan for their future. They quit a job they realize is making them sick or just not leading anywhere they particularly wanted to go, and begin an entirely new career or profession from nothing. They decide they will go to Bhutan before they settle down into a routine life, and suddenly discover a burning desire to become a Buddhist monk. Why can they do this? Is it just because young people are braver? Do they take more risks because they don’t have the life experience to think through all the possible negative consequences? In other words, are they blissfully ignorant?
I think that is definitely so, but instead of worrying on their behalf, which they never appreciate and indeed chafe against, I think we should take a few lessons from them. I used to be one of those mothers who always offered a nervous litany of concerns and fears about her kids’ choices. Offered the litany without solicitation, of course. It just bubbled up out of me, like a compulsion, and I convinced myself I was doing the right thing, counseling my naïve and judgment-impaired children, throwing water on their fires. It started when they were very young, and became so ingrained in me as a protective impulse, that at some point I couldn’t be any other way. I immediately went to that place where everything that could go wrong would, and into the dread, of course, I factored in the weighty heartache and fresh worrying I would personally experience when things inevitable turned sour. What a drag! How did I get so negative and fearful? And I’m not even remotely as negative as most people I know!
What saved me? I started noticing, finally, that there were some people who, when I mentioned something my kid was going to do, something that I felt okay about, would start going through all the things that could go wrong. They set forth all the reasons I should discourage my child. I started noticing that these were the same people who plan out every detail of their vacations, and always find it necessary to proudly point out how they were able to get a spot close by to an event because they charted out their course days earlier and made sure to arrive an hour early. All risk is managed away to provide as smooth a ride as possible. No supporting a kid’s dream, because a dream isn’t practical and almost certainly will fail. No pursuing their own dreams for the same reason. And certainly no left turns! So many of us will continue down a path that really isn’t suited to us, that is leading us astray or to a dead end, rather than make a left.
But perhaps it isn’t just the ever-spreading tumor of worry that drags us down, away from the risk and the rightly earned delight from successfully making a left. After all, when we are older, our vehicles are longer. Instead of a zippy little car or jet ski built for one, maybe two, they are freakin’ tractor-trailers, or huge tankers that carry all the people, responsibilities and ties we’ve accumulated. They don’t turn easily. They take up the entire intersection as they swing round, creating a disturbance, and threatening to upset our cargo. It makes sense to avoid that left! But is it sense or fear that keeps us from taking it? Is it our forgotten skills or long buried sense of adventure?
I know of people whose lifestyles involve changing locales every 5 or 7 years for professional reasons. Their craft never seems to get too big to turn. They find fun and adventure in every new place, and remain nimble, flexible, daring. Sure, moving is a pain, but they do it with good cheer and make the best of it. They have many friends all over the country with whom they keep up contact and visit. They have safe ports all over. But for those of us who stay in one port for too long, our crafts just seem to get bigger and bigger, maybe even stuck, and other ports begin to seem foreign, scary, hard to navigate, not worth the effort.
Maybe our crafts are not as big as we think. Maybe we just haven’t made a left in some time and we’ve lost the stout heart for it. I think even a person who once led an adventurous life for many years can lose heart if they’ve been settled for a while. They might even still make the occasional right, which isn’t nearly as scary, and tell themselves they’ve been making lefts.
No question, the left turn is far more challenging, even dangerous at times. And yes, being parked, or going straight, or even turning right is much safer. And maybe the surroundings we’ve been in for such an extended period of time are wonderful in many ways that we are loath to give up. But maybe what lies to the left is the promised land, the incredible place we never found because we just wanted to avoid that left. Maybe, if we go for it, we will discover that our craft, while indeed carrying a load, isn’t really that huge and heavy after all, and that we can in fact travel back and forth, keeping the delights of our old port while discovering even greater enchantments at a new one. And in the process, maybe we might realize that the young do not have the market on adventure and exploration, and that there is something to be said for venturing forth without a clear sense of what could happen. Maybe it keeps us young, and what’s wrong with that?
I told Diane, “Tell him to turn on his signal, take a deep breath and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. Or get on board and remind him how.”
Nothing makes you grasp how weird sleep is quite like going to sleep for the night in the clothes you wore that day. You take off your shoes and, still wearing shirt, pants, socks, and even the leather belt you had on, just lie on the bed (blanket optional), and sleep for seven or eight hours. People will give you a bunch of different reasons why we don’t normally do this. Like, it’s not comfortable, or you need separate sleep clothes to absorb the sleep smell we all generate (that’s just weird right there!), or if you don’t perform the ritual of undressing and washing, you’ll accumulate all kinds of grime on your face, etc. But these are just sacraments we’ve adopted to prepare for and regulate a most bizarre phenomenon. To sophisticate and romanticize something primal and animal and out of our control: we simply turn off, shut down to a bare minimum of breathing, beating, and chemical regulation. We hibernate like bears, only for several hours and not months at a time. And our dens are in the modern equivalent of caves. Compartments we’ve sectioned off, in dwellings that also have bigger shared compartments for food stores and communal domestic activities.
When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no formal break between your routines for day and night. You take away that tiny moment we’ve indoctrinated ourselves to notice (or, more accurately, created in the first place for our own reassurance). That moment we think we have deliberately chosen to embark on our journey to the restful, restorative, magical, mystical and even potentially frightening world of dreams. When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no ceremony. There is no moment. You just simply move to a bed and stretch out in a horizontal position.
The bed is the key. A lifetime habit of romanticizing sleep doesn’t disappear in one night of being too lazy to get up from the couch after a late television movie. No, to realize how weird sleep is, you have to deliberately decide, “Hey, you know what? I’m gonna go to sleep in my bed and in my clothes!” And you have to do it for two nights in a row at least, if only to shake the notion that sleeping in your clothes makes you a bum, a dysfunctional loser who might as well be passing out drunk. By the second night of sleeping in your day clothes – not the SAME clothes of course; you have to put on fresh clothes each morning! – you will feel instead like you are conducting a legitimate experiment to investigate the reality of sleep, and be shod of the guilt of abandoning conventions shared by all upright members of society. Yes, folks, I did this. Having the house all to myself now that the kids are in college helped. And I’ll even admit that it didn’t start out as an investigation, but merely as an act of defiance. Why bother going through all the rigmarole? I can do whatever I want. I can go to sleep in my clothes!!
But it turned out to be quite informative. It made me see how sleep is merely the recharging of our organic batteries. Sleep, after eating and expelling waste, is perhaps the strongest proof that we are, albeit very advanced creatures, creatures nonetheless. For even though we are never more vulnerable than when we are while sleeping, we must do it. In the end, it is compulsory. We can’t function without it for very long. There we are, completely defenseless, while our brains and our organs recharge and we generate more bone marrow, more neurons, more enzymes. And because deep down – deep, deep deep down – we know we are defenseless, we protect ourselves as much as we can, both physically and psychologically from this stark truth. We invent words like “slumber” to connote activity, a journey through the netherworld. Indeed, we kiss our loved ones goodnight, as if we are all going somewhere. We perform all sorts of rites such as putting on special, cozy garments, or tucking in our children and giving them a bedtime story. We sleep in the privacy of bedrooms, in homes locked for the night. We graciously offer guests the chance to rest undisturbed in private guest quarters, secure in the unspoken understanding that we are nearby sentinels who promise not to spy on them as they sleep. And we in turn don’t allow just anyone to see us sleep. We don’t sleep in front of the contractors who are doing work in our homes, or even good friends, unless we happen to be bunking with them on holiday. When we seek to economize in our youth, and stay in hostels while traveling, it makes us uncomfortable to sleep communally, but we take a calculated risk and put on a show of bravado, even as we clutch our backpacks or money holders close to our bodies. If we are unfortunate enough to fall asleep during a class or a lecture, we always awaken with a sense of mortification, not because we care about having insulted the teacher or the presenter, but because people have seen us in our vulnerable and undignified state. What if we drooled??
One exception that we all seem perfectly willing to make to our careful protection of ourselves in sleep, is napping on public transportation. It seems that from the earliest invention of public transit, we simply had to accept that the rocking, the jiggling, the boredom and the long passages of time would lull some of us into sleep and it just couldn’t be helped. So there is this shared willingness not to watch the guy leaning against the bus window softly snoring, or the couple, weary after a day of sightseeing, nestled into each other with eyes shut. We know that the same courtesy will be accorded to us, if our exhaustion gets the better of us on the commuter train home, or on the six hour plane ride. Indeed, given length of a typical flight, and the relative lack of movement allowed, we have actually come to feel quite safe and appropriate sleeping on a plane. In the case of flights far across hemispheres, we really have no choice. We come up against that compulsory need for recharging, even if we like to think of it more as an acceptable activity rather than what it actually is: a public shutting down. And so we make allowances, and respect the privacy of the snoozing traveler. Well, in most cases we do. Sadly, the introduction of the smart phone with camera has resulted in the potential for ridicule, as this photo taken of me on the way back from a youth trip to Nicaragua demonstrates. I’m the one with slack jaw.
But rather than dwell on the ignominy of shutting down like a switched off robot, ultimately I choose to celebrate what sleep indicates about our complexity of design and functioning. We are advanced organisms, requiring large amounts of energy for diverse and incredible tasks. We propel ourselves through space. We solve problems (and make some). We find our own fuel and make it even more appetizing. We create, and destroy and communicate. And, of course, we think. We contemplate and ruminate and theorize, and – need I say it? – navel-gaze. We even find ways of dressing up sleep so that we don’t have to face how basic and limited we nevertheless remain. If all that means I must be little more than a large body bag every night, so be it. I can’t choose to keep from shutting down, but I can embrace it and all that it allows me to do when I’m awake. Now, where are those pajamas?
Some people use the accusation of “gazing at your own navel” to dismiss a self-exploratory mental exercise as useless, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or worse, primitive. Something an ape might do. But an ape doesn’t ruminate as we do, not about its navel or anything else, and so I reject that characterization. To people apt to describe self-exploration as navel-gazing I say: sadly you are lacking in curiosity, self-awareness and frontal cortex complexity. For engaging in a deep consideration of one’s own ideas of the world is the sign, not just of wanting to soak up social, cultural, emotional and intellectual interactions, but of seeking to develop an understanding of one’s self in relation to all that information. Isn’t that how we improve? And so, I humbly offer you the fruits of my navel-gazing. My intent is to invite you to spark your own inward exploration. E. Marmer
