I almost don’t know how to react when things start to improve. I’ve gotten a promotion of sorts (in status, if not in income), with a concrete opportunity to demonstrate my abilities. I’ll have more occasion to interact with people I really like and enjoy, like the wonderful woman who coordinates the teacher training program at our studio. A boss with whom I had butted heads is no longer directly supervising me.
While I’ve always known that the only constant is change, I’m frankly astonished when the changes seem to happen in my favor.
**
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Only a week ago I was lying flat on my back moaning. These days about the only time you’ll find me flat on my back moaning is when I’m not feeling well. In this case, I was completely incapacitated by a blinding, excruciating, cannot-formulate-a-coherent-thought-any-better-than-Sarah-Palin migraine. The lethal trio of dehydration, hormonal fluctuations, and stress ganged up on me and thrashed my unarmed brain until I lost consciousness.
For several hours beforehand, however, I couldn’t slow or quiet my racing mind no matter what I did (breathing, visualization, counting backward), as if volition itself had been impaired by the pressure inside my skull. Maybe it was my right brain that had become impaired, and my unfettered left took off like an obsessive-compulsive with ADD. It was very strange, and not very pleasant. As I finally surrended and let it have its way with me, I wondered if I would actually experience the kind of a moment I’d been secretly longing for, a Byron Katie/Eckhart Tolle moment, when the egoic mind supposedly exhausts itself like a frantic hamster on a wheel and just collapses. I was actually hoping for that.
Alas, no such luck. Instead, I wound up contemplating how the yearning for transcendence of embodiment has been born of a sometime despair of it.
**
A friend of mine recently shared that a deceased family member’s spirit, who occasionally seems to communicate things to her, had told her “Enjoy having a body while you have one” — which, I must say, gave me a pang. I tried not to think about why, but she had unwittingly touched a sensitive spot.
Because in all honesty, dear reader, my Karamazovian attempts to pursue hedonistic pleasures haven’t been wildly successful, while all along I’ve been dogged by chronic pain of one form or another. This outcome reversal has always reminded me of something out of the book of Proverbs — “For them that seeketh to gratify the flesh, their flesh shall fester forthwith,” or some such beetle-browed Biblical damnation. Oh, I know it’s not like I was born with spina bifida (I can walk, thank god, even if my legs hurt), and I won’t try your patience with the full whine list or a grandma-style history of complaints. I’ve already shared with you some of the less comfortable physical manifestations of my emotional states, like the crushing chest pain I’ve got today after a “heart-opening” Kundalini class left me as vulnerable as a baby to the usual triggers.
Maybe none of this is anything unusual. Maybe I’ve been fooled by cultural propaganda featuring strong, hale Ayn-Randian celebrities who never betray so much as a head cold, when the truth is that the average person walking around has some undisclosed but chronic issue(s) of his or her own. Nevertheless having a screaming migraine which was promptly followed by a (brief, mercifully) UTI really felt like getting it at both ends.
In general my sixth chakra troubles me more frequently than the first two do anymore. I will disclose that in early childhood I had a string of horrible UTIs that led to a painful and (what was at my tender age) traumatic surgery; later, I struggled with a misunderstood and misdiagnosed form of dyspareunia as a young, desperate-to-be-sexually-active adult. (Imagine, for a moment, having a linebacker’s appetite thwarted by acute tonsillitis.) It’s stunning to me how little Western medicine understands the female anatomy even now. Hell, it’s criminal. Our “advanced” science has allowed us to invent more and better ways to decimate entire continents, while the typical gynecologist can only stare blankly when confronted with atypical indications. (The pleasure of women, after all, is a pretty low priority when there’s wars to be fought and Cialis to be manufactured.)
Too Much Information? Well, as with the suicidal thoughts, nobody wants to talk about this stuff in public, but maybe they ought to. How many people suffer in silence from some impolitic affliction, afraid they’ll be pathologized, overmedicated, pitied, or stigmatized? Comments, anyone? (For my part, I have a tag line to live up to, and besides, I gave up my pride to put on the clown suit in my last post.)
I suppose I should follow up on the cliffhanger, though, by saying that sometimes a girl has to take matters into her own hands. No one else is going to help you, if doctors don’t have a clue and men (so I found) prefer their toys with all parts functional (and, I should add, you don’t relish the prospect of lesbianism). As long as we’re fixing our own toilets and building our own furniture…it’s just one more DIY, ladies. If we possess the right tools, we can remedy a lot of things ourselves.
**
So my friend’s words got me ruminating on a lifetime of physical “challenges” even before the migraine hit. And once it did, my racing brain went around and around with the question of whether I should give more weight to those words or to the competing, compelling, ascetic teachings within Buddhism (i.e., wouldn’t it be better to shave my head, join a monastery, and learn how to “die while alive?”). But how much of my attraction to the latter is sour grapes? In other words, to put my thinking about this simplistically: Should I relinquish any aspirations to feeling good in my body, because suffering and death are the only sure thing? When you have a migraine, this seems like a no-brainer. No pun intended. I would have actually liked to leave my body right then if I could have.
Some unspeakable losses have made my aforementioned friend a circumspect Buddhist who professes nonattachment. At the same time, however, she’s generally strong and healthy and has that rarest of phenomena, a truly happy, passionate twenty-year marriage. If I were she, I’d probably be enjoying my body as much and as frequently as possible.
Asceticism, on the other hand, reasons: You’re going to lose whatever you have, anyway, so you might as well give it up now! (Of course this approach doesn’t address whether, as the old blues song goes, you can lose what you ain’t never had.) Most people don’t believe I’m forty; I may not look it, but I sure as hell feel it, and they might believe it too if they saw me naked. I know I can’t hang onto youthful cuteness indefinitely. I often think that the best days of my physical existence are behind me — a brief window of time in my thirties when all the sensual abundance I’d never even been close enough to smell was dumped unceremoniously in my lap. My soul got gluttonously fat with all the obscene beauty I was taking in from every direction — jasmine-drenched green mountains overlooking glassy blue lakes, wrought-iron balconies with riotous cascades of flowers tumbling over them, vaulted stained-glass basilicas swarming with cherubs, aromatic concoctions of pungent cheeses and aubergine, smooth almond-toned stretches of skin like warm velvet to the touch. (Is there anything in the world so beautiful as a beautiful man?)
On second thought, maybe I what I’m lacking is gratitude.
**
I could, after all, have been born blind and bedridden, without the capacity to enjoy any of these things. I could have died in childhood. I could have grown up in a region where my physical lot as a female would have been to have my troublesome orgasmic parts decisively excised before puberty, to carry backbreaking jugs of water mile after scorching mile every day, to be raped repeatedly by marauding soldiers, and to die at twenty-three of AIDS. I could also have been swathed in a burka and pledged at the age of fourteen to a brutish zealot with poor hygiene and three other wives. I could have been sold by my desperate family into child prostitution or offshore sweatshop slavery. There are women all over the world who can’t even afford the luxury of dreams, whose experience of embodiment is largely a kind of hell on earth. They may never get to taste heavenly ambrosia even once.
And I’m bitching because I didn’t get seconds.
Blame the measurement mind again, that function of the ego that makes comparisons and creates hierarchies, that focuses on Joneses who may or may not really exist, those shiny happy American Dreamers.
Maybe, after all, that svelte nymph in my yoga class who can cross her legs in headstand lost her fiancé in a freak car accident, and every morning she awakens to howling bottomless grief. Maybe that leggy Aspen-ite in the Lexus spends days doubled over from ulcerative colitis. Maybe that adorable young couple at the grocery store has an acrimonious or nonexistent sex life, or maybe they just found out they’re infertile. “Envy is ignorance,” said Emerson, and the late great David Foster Wallace encouraged projection of a more compassionate sort:
I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do…if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
The truth is, most of the time we just don’t know.
I started “What The Hell is This?” with the notion in mind that much of what is assumed to be the universal norm or “reality” is in fact not so. That all the world’s a stage, and most of us are probably just playing dress-up. Don Miguel Ruiz asserts that all of us are lying all of the time. This may be an overgeneralization, but I suspect it’s not far off. We want to look like we’ve got it all together, know what we’re doing, and have the answers. I’ve been acquainted with more than a few people who project this to the world who unfailingly call me when they’re totally losing their shit. Because they know I know that I don’t know.
Screw the Joneses and the imaginary yardstick. I still have all my teeth, and this cafe serves a delicious pumpkin cake. I’ll breathe in the scent of dry leaves as I glide along the sunny autumn streets on my red bicycle going home. This is what embodiment means to me at this moment in time, and in a corner of the planet where I’m free to move about as I please, I’m rich. I’ll deal with the losses as they occur; why go all Bush Doctrine and try to pre-empt them?
I think this is what my friend knows: that the world is really like a big daycare, and at the end of the day we have to put the toys away and say bye-bye to our playmates. None of this is really ours, but we’re invited to enjoy the loaners in whatever way we’re able.
And to be grateful for any changes in our favor.
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