My Tent on The Beach

Yowza…let me talk to you a little about how my schedule has changed in the last 3 weeks.  For the past 2 years (2 YEARS) I was gifted, granted, held hostage by these fellowships I had which explicitly stated I could not work anywhere else.  Realistically, that translated into 2 years of wasted time…completely unstructured, completely free, completely solitary time to mess around with.  Some would consider that heaven and, in theory, it sounds good.  But doesn’t all theory sound good?  This blog has chronicled the actual nightmare…and it was a nightmare.

Enter Situation Today: yesterday I worked in my office at school for 14 hours.  In a given week, I have about 5 hours to play around with…the rest of it is spent either in a structured activity or getting to a structured activity.  I’m running. And it’s actually heavenly.  That’s right…heavenly.  Will it stay heavenly for long, who knows.  All I know…right now…it’s very good.

But there is one thing that I’ve reacquired that I’m not so thrilled about: the feeling like time is slipping away.  I have to schedule bathroom breaks; I know to the minute how long each light is on Lake Shore Drive; I have figured out how to whittle my morning routine down to exactly 30 minutes.  On some days that means choosing between mascara and toast.  As much as I like the structure, I’ve lost a little purchase on the whimsy, creativity…on the felicity of the open road of time.  I’ve gone from all options open (which is overwhelming) to one option open (which is fascism)…and once again I find myself pausing (for no longer than 14 minutes) to reflect on where the balance might be.

I was thinking this yesterday as I was walking home in the veritable fall evening and I thought of two possibilities.  One, I find the felicity in the moment (why does the answer ALWAYS seem to be in the moment…it’s getting annoying….damn Buddhists, they know everything apparently).  I’ve noticed I already do that.  Even though I’m scheduled as I used to be, I’m utterly not stressed about it.  I think that’s the effects of yoga and Tom (don’t know Tom…yeah, get over it…you won’t know Tom).  Two, I’ve found a lot more surprises than I expected to people-wise.  My schedule forces me to get out of my own way when it comes to allowing people the chance and the time to initiate contact and express a desire to hang out.  I’ve been jumping the gun for years now…now that I’m forced to give people a chance to do what they will, they’re doing it…and it’s fantastic.  Who knew.

As it turns out, time is not on my side.  I’m working against the clock all day long, starting at 5:30am and ending about 9:15pm (and even at 9:15 I’m fighting…Just one more chapter in this book and I’d be ready…).  What is on my side is the hard work I’ve done to CHILL OUT, the effects both physical and mental, stemming from yoga and the fact that I’ve been reintroduced to the fact that I have to be plugged in to the greater world out there…I’ve got some work to do that has nothing to do with nuns, IRB, or the word “problematic.”

Lesson Learned: Keep the fellowships, folks.  I don’t want ‘em.  No, I can’t want ‘em anymore. (That’s a quote from a musical…of course I won’t tell you which one).

That is not my title.  It’s actually a book I’m reading right now that is really changing my life.  I love that books have the power to do that…if we heed them…well, some of them.  I think this particular one is brilliant because it falls into that “magical realism” genre in which everything and nothing makes sense all at the same time. It’s a story for the ultimately story-teller…it seems it’s completely unreal…until you start trying out some of the ideas and then watch as what seems impossible merges with possible.

It’s goofy and profound at the same time. A rare combination, I find.

So anyway, one of the ideas I stumbled across that’s really amazing is this push/pull situation he introduces.  I’ve always struggled with the idea of “letting go.”  That sounds terrifying to me.  Letting go generally means that for 2 seconds you feel weightless and then are introduced to a world of fantastic pain…that last longer than 2 seconds. In my book, letting go has always meant giving up.  Instead, in this story, I ran across this idea which has revolutionized my way of thinking: when something is pressing you in a particular direction, instead of pushing against it, why not pull?

Wait.  What?

That sounds absurd.  Won’t I just be falling then? (And I always envision this as happening with a door such that I’m pulling, they’re pushing, and I’m falling backwards.  The answer is actually no…you’re not falling necessarily.  You’re just not spending so much energy resisting the flow of things.

Wait. Whaaaaat?

I’ve never, EVER considered this idea before.  Whenever I’ve approached letting go, it’s always ultimately been temporary…probably because that’s the way I envisioned it.  Just thinking about it required an overwhelming amount of change on my part, so it seemed.  I like to hold things.  So just to let everything go is completely ridiculous…and not doable.  But the push/pull scenario…well, that’s event-related…I can do that…and it’s fairly small scaled…and it makes sense…and it seems easier.

And it is.  I’ve just tried this in small ways throughout my days over the past week or so…it has literally changed the fabric of my life.  Shockingly, nothing concrete has changed…I still walk in the same direction, my goals are still my goals and the troubles still my troubles. But there’s none of the weariness in dealing with all of it, a symptom brought on by the degree to which I was standing vigilantly and waiting to resist things.  If I’m pulling, not only do I not initiate the action but I also don’t work hard to stop it.  (This is ultimately “going with the flow”…but that always sounded condescendingly “new agey” to me.  I’m not a river…what does that even mean?!?)  But, like Liz Lemon, “I’m a pusher.  I push people.”  Turns out, being a puller is way better.  If pushing is trying, then pulling is being…I think.

I’d rather just be.

I’ve been doing this for a couple days and the degree to which I can breathe more freely and feel and see things more clearly astounds me.  Of course, like any good crash diet, the devil is in the maintenance of it.  Can I sustain it?  I’d venture to say only, “I don’t know.”  But my experience with crash diets has been the loss of the will because the demands are just too great to bear.  I’m not sure I’d lose motivation with something that makes me feel so whole. This may be a crash diet I can get behind.

It’s the Path of the Peaceful Warrior…the book, I mean.  That’s the title of the book.

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless cracks me up with his yoga malapropisms.  Let’s just say he’s not a yoga practitioner…and because of that, I love when he humors me and asks about how yoga is going.  The other day he opened with, “So…how’s downward-seeking dog coming?”  This is a hybrid of mockery and sheer not-knowery, but the actual pose is called downward facing dog…which makes the new title a darker, perhaps more morbid version (although more closely connected to my actual experience of working in downward facing dog which is just generally sheer torture).  Although, I digress…I don’t want to talk about downward facing dogs or even yoga.

I want to talk about the insights I’ve stumbled on this week…and they’re really about going inward.

Oh this single, solitary life.  Oh this PhD, dissertation-devising life.  I think I can imagine no situations more isolating…put them together and…well, you’re the equivalent of a hermit…no, you’re the troll that lived under the bridge.  At least a hermit sounds, in some faraway place, honorable.  But the troll…just warty.  And that’s what this summer was for me…warty and horrible…and friggin hot.  So it’s not coincidence that within hours of it cooling off, I’ve come back around to some of my senses.  But not without effort and a commitment to cleaning out the dark little corners of my life that I’d rather forget are there….the places I retreat to when I feel warty…and thus breed more wartiness.  If I wanna get out from under the bridge, I gotta start clearing that stuff out.

When I started to work at clearing out the underbrush, I realized a really interesting (and potentially devastating), nasty little habit I have.  When warty, I spread myself really thin.  Not with work or not enough sleep…I call and contact everyone I know in a (often futile) attempt to “be acknowledged.”  “Hey guys, I’m Heeeerrrrrre.  No, over HEEEEEERRRRRE.”  I’ve always thought that keeping social contact would soothe the wounded soul.  As it turns out, not really.  In fact, in this experience, it’s not unlike the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. Though not intended to make me immortal, each little speck of social interaction I would try to create would spread me out literally too thin.  No one was home.  People weren’t answering the phone.  I was getting the “text message response” (you know the one…when you’ve called and they return the message not with voice mail or a call but with a text…regardless of what it says on that phone, just the action says, “riiiiiight….I’m not going to talk to you today.”)  “No one cares. I’m insignificant. I’m an afterthought,” says my warty, trollish internal chatter.  Thus ensues more panic, frustration…ultimately isolation.

So, on this last round of wretchedness, out of nothing other than just not wanting to talk to anyone, I sat with the silence.  I sat with the aloneness.  I actually moved away from people.  And it ended up being a strengthening experience.  In a myriad of ways.  When I stopped flailing around in a panic, thinking I was moving toward making a better situation, and just was there in my world, in my moment…things actually transformed.  People responded in new ways.  They met my change with changes of their own, changes I had hoped to have but could never see how I’d get them.  It was incredible, actually.

I think my struggle in yoga with downward facing dog is not a coincidence to this story.  The whole spiritual point of that pose is strengthening in places that we don’t often use for protection.  When we protect ourselves we cover our vulnerabilities with our stronger parts.  We turn our shoulder into oncoming force or use our shoulders to fully absorb the weight of force, whether it’s our bodies falling or hitting into something.  We tense the neck and turn the head.  We firm our hamstrings, preparing to spring into action.  We cover and run.  Downward facing dog requires you to kind of reverse all of that…you’re deeply stretching your shoulders and hamstrings, thus rendering them not the strong points but the stretched points.  You open your chest to the floor, use the muscles of your torso and upper and lower arms to push you away from the ground…you relax the neck and jaw.  You open…you uncover…you dis-cover…or if you’re me you start sweating profusely as the muscle fibers in your shoulders and hamstrings audibly rip.

Interestingly, though, it mirrors what has to happen in order to be an inward seeking dog.  As I have to open my chest and torso in downward facing dog, I have to open myself to being alone, by myself, quiet, not panicking.  As I strengthen those tiny little muscles (that kill to the 12th power when you pull them) around your back and ribs, I also strengthen my resolve to emotionally support myself and not need to outsource my troubles.  As I learn to breathe through the hellfires burning in the backs of my legs and shoulders, I learn to withstand the heat of that panic that tells me, “no one cares what happens to you.”  It’s a journey that has to be settled into…and one that requires an acceptance of the challenges and an acknowledgment of the good sure to come, even if in the present it hurts like sideways facing sonofoabitch.

I am an inward seeking dog…and I think I’m in the process of learning to be okay with that.  But I already know this much.  Inward seeking dogs aren’t really warty…not warty at all.  Let’s put a “w” in the win column on that insight.

The start of school.  There’s nothing like it, although it never feels real until 1) after Labor Day and 2) after the weather starts to act like fall.  But regardless, I’m teaching 5 days a week this Fall (a tremendous increase from what I was doing last year) and I’m just really happy about it.  And relieved, actually.

The longer I’m in grad school (and it’s getting very long…this is the start of my 6th year) the more real the toll of working solitarily starts to take hold.  Writing is an isolating process–alone with my ideas all day–and I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon when it comes to writing–it actually makes me a fragile person.  I’ m moody and emotional.  I’m restless and discontented.  It’s taken a long time for me to realize that this isn’t something I’ve become totally; it’s only who I am when the overwhelming weight of this “dissertation” takes hold.  And as it turns out, teaching is the natural counterpoint to writing.  Through it I personally find a great balance.  It is therapeutic…and not in a needy sort of way.  It’s the space I need to synthesize things.  I think it’s the best of both worlds when both student and teacher can benefit from the experience.  Things “get done.”

I also happen to be teaching at 8am on MWF, so that means a lot of early mornings are in my future.  There was a time I would be less than thrilled with that proposition…and I am epically tired today (the 2nd day of school) because I still can’t make myself fall asleep in enough time to get in the recommended 8, but eventually exhaustion will take over and I’ll get to where I need to be.  But the thing with mornings is that it’s really the best of myself.  Though I always thought I was a night person, I think I’m actually a very, very early person.  It’s the time when the weight and worries of the day haven’t formed yet…I’m very clear (surprisingly clear) at that hour.  It’s been a nice discovery.

So far, I’m into both my classes at two different schools and I can’t deny the fact that this turn of events…going back into the classroom…has been nothing short of a godsend.  This will be exactly how this dissertation gets done.  I’m committing it to writing so that every time I get coerced to think about another way I can return here and remember this.  For good.

I’m a teacher.  And with students is where I need to be.