Katy on Wellbeing

Perfect Right Now - Part II

 

In Perfect Right Now, I posted the first of three poems that remind us that we -- and our lives -- are to be celebrated as they are today.  Not when we've achieved some future imagined state of perfection (or back during some past glory), but right now.

Weathering, by Fleur Adcock, was written when she was living in England's rugged and beautiful Lake District.  She embraces the signs of age in her face and body with such deep compassion and wisdom -- and, yes, indifference -- that it inspires us to do likewise.

Weathering, by Fleur Adcock

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

 

And the final poem, by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, is about the deep pleasure of coming home to yourself and your life.  For me, it says that, at the end of the day, all that external searching was not necessary.  Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to the stranger who has loved you all your life .....

Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

That's it.  Sit.  Feast on your life.

Perfect Right Now

I received a surprising number of emails about my recent post You Don't Have To Be Good.  It seems that for many people, there was relief and freedom in the idea that we're perfect just as we are.  I've been thinking again about our tendency to judge ourselves and our circumstances as somehow requiring improvement.  Sure, things are fine now, but would be better if we were younger / skinnier / prettier / faster / healthier /  smarter / richer / more successful / more productive / employed / enlightened / in love / married / living in Vancouver / on tv / tenured / famous, etc etc etc.

Of course it's nonsense.  By now we are all familiar with the research finding that the things we think will make us happy rarely do, in any sustainable way.  So how about we just learn to find ourselves and our circumstances perfect right now?  How about we celebrate ourselves and our lives today, and allow them to fill us up with passion, joy and awe exactly as they are?

There are some great poems that immediately bring us into this state.  Here are three of my favorites.  One in this post, and the others in Part II. 

This one celebrates the ferocity, eccentricity, and messiness of each individual life.  It gets down in the fire and the mud and the love and the tears.  It reminds us that the life force sings and shrieks and dances through each of us uniquely, and who cares what society tells us that should look like.

We Have Come To Be Danced, by Jewel Mathieson

We have come to be danced not the pretty dance not the pretty pretty, pick me pick me dance but the claw our way back into the belly of the sacred, sensual animal dance the unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance the holding the precious moment in the palms of our hands and feet dance

We have come to be danced not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance but the wring the sadness from our skin dance blow the chip off our shoulder dance and slap the apology from our posture dance

We have come to be danced not the monkey see, monkey do dance one, two dance like you one two three, dance like me dance but the grave robber, tomb stalker tearing scabs and scars open dance the rub the rhythm raw against our souls dance

We have come to be danced not the nice invisible, self-conscious shuffle but the matted hair flying, voodoo mama shaman shakin' ancient bones dance the strip us from our casings, return our wings, sharpen our claws and tongues dance the shed dead cells and slip into the luminous skin of love dance

We have come to be danced not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance but the meeting of the trinity; the body, breath and beat dance the shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance the mother may I? yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance the Olly Olly Oxen Free Free Free dance the everyone can come to our heaven dance

We have come to be danced where the kingdoms collide in the cathedral of flesh to burn back into the light to unravel, to play, to fly, to pray to root in skin sanctuary

We have come to be danced WE HAVE COME

Continued: Perfect Right Now Part II

The Void They Don't Tell You About

In between the end of one thing (relationship, career, stage in life, etc) and the beginning of the next is a period of emptiness, chaos, floating.  We may mask it with the actions of daily life.  But at the heart of any particular transition, there is a big blank.  Though I left consulting believing I knew what I wanted to do, my plans soon disappeared into the void.

Our society recognizes endings and new beginnings.  But we rarely acknowledge the intervening abyss.  I had read about it in Transitions, by William Bridges, but was nevertheless surprised by the depth of its emptiness, and by how long I spent there.  It felt like deep inertia, shaped by small daily routines. 

Because we hit our midlife reorientations at around the same time, I have several friends on parallel paths.  I could see them making their way through the same thing.  But however supported we are by our families and friends, there is something essentially solitary about a big life transition.  Ultimately, it’s between you and your soul, choosing your new path, hoping it’s a good one, and bumbling along it a step or two each day.  Or not.

There is a rare feeling of freedom that comes with being in between.  You’re a stranger in your old life and your new one.  I couldn’t even dream about the future during that period.  Any guidance I received was limited to right now, today.  I could see the step I was taking, but no further.  It’s a time of living in the moment because there’s nowhere else to go.  

Are you in this period yourself, and seeking a roadmap?  In Transitions, Bridges tells us that what he calls the “neutral zone” is typically:

• Recognized in some tribal societies as the “time between dreams”; the time where the person would go alone into the desert or forest
• Marked by feelings of lostness, emptiness or disconnection
• Characterized by greater need for time alone, and attention to small, seemingly unproductive routines, like walking in the park, staring out the window, or drinking tea.  Bridges calls this “the basic industry of the neutral zone, which is attentive inactivity and ritualized routine.”

He urges surrendering to this emptiness, and identified three reasons why this gap between the old life and the new is essential to the process of transition.

1. “The process of transformation is essentially a death and rebirth process, rather than one of mechanical modification.  …. Chaos is not simply “a mess”.  Rather it is the primal state of pure energy to which the person must return for every true new beginning.  It is only from the perspective of the old form that chaos looks fearful.  From any other perspective, it looks like life itself, as yet unshaped by purpose or identification. …
2. “The process of disintegration and reintegration is the source of renewal.  ….  In keeping with our mechanistic bias, we have tried to make do with “recharging” and “repair”, imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing.  But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. …
3. “The last reason for emptiness between the stages of the life journey is the perspective it provides on the stages themselves.  Viewed from the neutral-zone emptiness, the realities of the every day world look transparent and insubstantial; we can see that everything we ordinarily think of as reality is now an “illusion”.”  - pp. 140-142

So what can we do about it?  Bridges offers suggestions including “don’t try to fast-forward”, and “find a regular time and place to be alone”.  I found that there was nothing I could really do except surrender into the unknown, rest, and try to treat myself gently.

But perhaps the best advice comes accidentally, in a teaching story from one of the native tribes in the Pacific Northwest, answering a child’s question “what should I do if I get lost in the woods?”  Here it is, in the form of a poem by David Wagoner:

Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.
- from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems, 1999

For me, this poem captures the paramount importance of “attentive inactivity” and letting yourself be found by the larger Intelligence that embraces and moves through you.  Have you experienced this void during a major life transition?  What was it like for you?