My Tent on The Beach

Maybe a year ago, I was thinking about the fact that I hadn’t talked to a man who had been possibly the best friend I’ve ever had up until the fall of 2005.  I left my previous job to move to Chicago and go to grad school and “it” stopped working shortly thereafter.  I remember the moment I knew I probably wouldn’t talk to him again: I was inundated with the stress of classes, planning a conference, living on my own in an apartment above a freak who was scaring the living piss out of me.  It was a day like any other day and I was trying to make the best of things but losing the battle.  There was silence on the other end of the line and then, “Katie…I just can’t talk to you about school anymore…I can’t take it when I’ve had a very rough week.  I’ve been trying to decide on new upholstery for my couch and I’m just tied up in knots about it.” (At this point, you may be asking questions…go ahead…you know the answers).

And that was it…a switch turned off in my head and I knew that was it.  We’d taken it to the limit and couldn’t go any further. “I’ll talk to you soon,” I said and started counting as the days turned to weeks turned to months…turned to 4 years.  I’d felt tremendous guilt during that time…maybe I should call, maybe I should stop in on a trip home.  No.  I just couldn’t bring myself to do it…like something in my DNA told me it was gone.

So at some point over the course of 2009, though I can’t remember when, I did call and left a voicemail saying I was sorry…I knew he couldn’t talk about school anymore…and it hadn’t gotten any less stressful…but that I thought if I let it go now, there would never be knowing whether or not this was my fault for throwing something away.  I didn’t expect to hear back but about six weeks later he called; we talked about movies and tv shows.  I asked about his mom.  He told me I should call when I come home the next time…we’ll grab coffee.  He said he’d call next week. And I was glad when he didn’t.

It seems so counterintuitive to feel that relief…especially in our culture that’s so much like “we’ll work extra hard to save whatever we can.”  But it was just gone.  There was nothing left to save.  A friendship that spanned more crossword puzzles than I could count, thousands of miles through Italy, France, Czech Republic, Akron Ohio…all reduced to an awkward, stilted conversation about watching The Amazing Race for the 8th year in a row. Just let it go with grace.

And I think I have.  But what I know now is the feeling–that gut level weight that hangs right below your ribcage–of it being over…whatever it was.  I now know the moment, to the nanosecond, that what has been working so far just doesn’t take anymore and that sure grip that was once there starts to falter.

That’s one of the worst feelings in the world.

What a weird time to live in.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tough choices…making those decisions that change the course of life forever.  Maybe because I’ve been watching people make the choices that will change their lives forever. And though sure to be good in the end, we all do a lot of work everyday…work that maybe has never been done before.

Things are hard, yes, and for many reasons…but the work I’m talking about I think is unique to today.  Once expansion was the name of the game…go west, young man…manifest destiny…Antarctica.  Today we suffer the perils of the distance created by expansion.  Nearly everyone I talk to is afraid in some way of distance–letting go, being alone, going somewhere new.  It’s idyllic in a sense…but not in the real one.  Our worldview is huge…and as much as we talk about the greatness of modern expansion, we suffer the effects of it.  We yearn in a much different way today…because we can never really let go…or forget…or be forgotten.  We’re all just floating around in the ether of memories.

I guess I’ve always been aware of my own worries about this and I’ve done everything in my power to do the work I need to to be okay where I am.  But today I watched a friend fear the very fear I have…and it’s heart-breaking to see that worry in someone else.  And I can feel the panic…and it’s very real. I think it’s real to a lot of people.

To whom much has been given, much is expected.  That’s always true and I guess a deal you make with the devil of privilege, whatever kind plagues you.  But the expectation is what may haunt you.  The higher the expectation, the higher the risk of failure.  It sounds so…privileged…and yet is quite the opposite.

I was sitting in my dining room yesterday, contemplating the possibilities for new paint colors.  Yes, I was sitting and staring at the wall.  But it was not without intention.  I got lost in thinking about the day that Kristine, Tim, and Mike came over to put the first color on the walls–I can remember what they were wearing, what we talked about, and the fact that Mustafa got sick and tired of the noise at about 10pm and we had to call it a night. And then I remembered thinking to myself on that painting day, “It’ll be a weird moment when you stop and think about this very moment sometime in the future.  I wonder what you’ll be thinking about?”  And I found myself in “that moment”–and realized that things are moving in very real, visceral ways.

I’ve always played that little game with myself.  It’s a more abstract way of throwing down breadcrumbs–purposely–to remember and reflect on the differences between the way I think things will happen and the way they actually unfold.  Whenever I hit a “that moment,” I’m consistently amazed (and sometimes awed) by the incredible ways things work out.  It didn’t used to be my mantra but one of my new favorite phrases to insert anywhere doubt lives is “It’ll all work out.”  It’s my game that allows me to know that’s the case.  And even more incredibly, I’m never dissatisfied with the ways in which things work out.  It turns out life is a much better storyteller than I…it always throws in a plot twist I never could have dreamed up in a million years.

What’s interesting about the way the game has changed for me over the years is “that moment” used to be determined at the start of something big: when I started grad school, I wondered what it would feel like the first time I said, “This is the start of my 6th year” (sadly, I never imagined saying things like “this is the start of my 8th year” or “I’ve been doing this almost a decade” but I’d better start getting prepared).  In my first year in Chicago, I wondered where I’d be living 5 years down the road.  (The answer turns out to be “here.”)  And when it comes to people…well, those are stories I never could have even dreamed.  It seems, almost, that Chicago has upended almost everything I expected when I first got here.  My best friends are people that, upon meeting them I thought, “I want to be their friend but I don’t know how.”  Somehow, I figured it out–we figured it out.  Others I thought I’d know forever have fallen into the “friend ‘everything’ drawer.”  You know that one, completely jam-packed drawer of not even organized chaos that you just shove random things in and think, “I’ll definitely have to organize this drawer one of these days.”  That “friend drawer” is full of partial acquaintances or those “lost” forever in that morass of “I knew you really well once.”  I wonder what that moment will be like…the one immediately after I realize I’ve mostly cleaned out that drawer?  Aw, let’s face it: that drawer and my living room will never be really free of clutter…there will always be fragments of friends hanging out in there.

And here’s the most curious part of the “that moment” game: there are whole categories of things I’ve dared myself not to even imagine.  Things I want so desperately, so completely, that the thought of not having them actually gives me pain. The thought of missing them makes me irretrievably sad.  I specifically remember a series of moments like this when it comes to singing.  I remember walking out of contemporary choir and thinking, “It’s never going to be more than this and that’s okay,” but secretly wishing in my heart it would be, but I didn’t know how.  And “that moment” is here now…and some days I wonder where that path will continue to lead…and I can’t know; I just have to not ask questions.  When I use perfect, gut-wrenching honesty, my game has proven to me that a majority of things I’ve asked for, wished for, hoped for…I’ve gotten.  And when I examine the means, I know it’s a story I never could have created myself.  Had I undertaken it my way, I never would have reached the end I wanted.

Basically, my dining room reflection allowed me to conclude that I’m a crappy writer of fiction.  But I always knew that.  More importantly, though, if I allow the better writer of fiction to work…the ends…well, they’re always a story worth waiting for.

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 funny thing about insight is that I can have it firmly in my grasp one moment and the next thing I know it’s poof, gone.  What the hell?

Today I want answers.  I’ve been trying (and actually succeeding) about being more Zen about accepting what’s coming at me and living with decisions and, while I vaguely remember that, the actual content of those insights is incredibly gone from my head.  It feels like I’m back at square one today.

And here’s why.  This always happens to me.  At the point I was having insight, everything was theoretical.  No changes happening.  Today the changes are real…I’ve hit those “markers” of time that I set weeks or days ago and now it’s real.  Before it was an idea.  Today it’s anxiety.  I guess it’s good to have the insights first…at least I can harken back to them and no matter how crazy they sound now, at least I know I thought them and that I do possess the ability to think them again…if I try…real hard.

Change is hard.  Uncertainty is hard. Working to fight a knee-jerk panic reaction is very hard.  And while I know that what’s transpiring here today–school-related, friend-related, me-related–will absolutely work out in the end…

…today it feels not good.  And the challenge is working through…

I spend a lot of time on “waiting:” I myself wait for things to transpire, for people; I reflect on whether or not I should wait; I wonder if waiting ever does any good.  Given the number of years I’ve felt like this has become a kind of mantra, I’m becoming convinced that waiting is more a symptom of a particular kind of worldview as opposed to action.  Waiting almost seems antithetical to action; it’s non-action; it’s….waiting.

As I get older (and one would hope wiser…which I always think is the actual purpose of thinking about age at all–as a mark of life experience) I’m beginning to see waiting less as a courteous gesture on my part (I’ve always approached it like, “I’ll just sit here and wait til you get your shit together…don’t you worry about me.”) and more of a hunkering down–steeling myself against whatever kind of roiling storm is headed my way.  The bigger the storm, the harder I hunker.  I have a “wait it out” mentality…and I think I always have.  It’s how I’ve made it through just about every phase of my life.

But I think I’m becoming a cautionary tale for the hunker mentality; I have a really horrible relationship with the inevitable and as long as time is the mode by which our lives play out, inevitability is always going to be there.  The truth will out in the end…always…(by the by, I’ve never quite understood the grammar on that phrase yet this is how it’s used…a question for the ages).  And actually, when I push past what is a debilitating hunker impulse, I’ve watched the experience of inevitability work itself out.  Or at least present new opportunities that appear to materialize out of thin air.

This reflection is brought to you by the letter “I” and a conversation I had with a friend yesterday.  It’s a conversation that’s been long overdue…as I count it, it’s been about a year and a half since things have been “right.”  We’re both hunkerers so the unbearableness of the present was enough for me to finally draw a line in the sand and polish off my dueling pistol; said friend showed up with dueling pistol in hand…it was bigger than I expected. And thus I was swept into the inevitable, partially by my own hand and partially by the wake of my dueling partner’s efforts…and I couldn’t stop thinking, “This is it; the moment I’ve been dreading…I didn’t think it would look like this.”

It wasn’t an easy day.  It won’t be an easy week.  After that the stings that are there will fade.  My new reality will become “every other day” and everything will resume forward motion at its own pace and with new questions daring me to find new answers.  But in the midst of all of that, I couldn’t stop thinking two thoughts: I didn’t think it would look like this and How did this happen? I’ve felt alternating waves of guilt, then anger, then a simple old-fashioned giving in.  I kept wondering if the hunters and gatherers ever came to this point.  Inevitability was at my door and I just had to let it come in.

I didn’t think it would look like this. And today, it’s not a bad thing.  That’s the weird part about this inevitability; I can breathe today in a way I haven’t for a long time.  I can focus on what I need to do to get my work and, in a lot of ways, my life on track, a focus that was falling by the wayside. But mostly what’s missing is the worry associated with “what will happen when the inevitable comes?”  I’ve seen the inevitable…it was at my door…and in that moment it was okay for it to come.  And with it it brought Hope, Opportunity, and Peace of mind.  Also in it’s entourage were Hurt Feelings and Bruised Ego; those guys are nothing but trouble so I asked them to go. I can still see them poking their heads up over the windowsills, trying to peer in.  At least they can only look.

I’ve spent some quality time with Inevitable and I think there might be a spark of something there.  I didn’t offer him a beer or pull up the coffee table so he could rest his feet. But then, he didn’t ask for it.

Maybe someday.

I’ve been going on autopilot the last couple days.  My energy is low, low, low.  I’ve been stressed out to the point that it should be called, “stressed in” (in that much like backdraft, the lack of oxygen in a burning room will first suck everything into it and then blow it to smithereens).  It’s a phase…I think the natural valley after a month of high-energy “I’m moving and it’s summer and I got Active for the Wii.”  But it’s these times when I think some of the greatest things can happen because, for whatever reason, I’ve just had to let go of my strangle-hold on everything…and have found wonders on the other side of over-management.

For instance:

1. I sang in a concert last Sunday that turned out to be one of the greatest moments of my life.

2. I realized I like the world a lot better without my IPod.

3. The Madonna della Strada Chapel in the evenings is a beautiful place to be.

4. I’m much more capable and interested in my culture special field than I previously thought.

5. A friend of mine from years gone by appeared out of nowhere and apparently is now living in Evanston.

6. House guests can make life a little more worthwhile if even for a short time.

7. Transitions don’t have to be horribly painful.

8. Everything in it’s time.

I reflect on this all the time.  For some reason, the lesson of letting go takes time to sink in.  I’ve never trusted it.  And I think that’s precisely the problem.  I’m learning…slowly.