For the past few days I’ve been sporadically weeping with elation, relief, and another sensation that doesn’t have as ready a name. Think of it as the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight. Or as the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone. I’ve experienced this exquisitely poignant sensation before on a personal level, and my country has heaped humiliations, cruelties, and disappointments upon its black citizens on a collective level for centuries — so when I saw the tears in Jesse Jackson’s eyes Tuesday night, forty years after he watched Martin fall, I crumbled with empathic overwhelmment. Could it really be? Could we, as a nation, have so resoundingly exalted a member of his perpetually embattled and subjugated race? Can we, dare we let ourselves believe it’s real?

Yes. Yes. Yes we have. Yes we can. The impossible dream of Dr. King has come true. Barack Obama, a brown-skinned man with an unabashedly African name, has just been elected as our forty-fourth president.

And he is clearly the best man for the job.

How can we not weep?

**

Over the weekend preceding the election, I committed an act of radical personal catharsis. My idea was to finally release my own obsolete, failure-ridden, profoundly unhappy past, and clear the way for transformation, at least on a microcosmic level. In other words, to do what I would have my dysfunctional country do. After all, as goes AlienBaby, so goes America! But seriously: over the space of two days and almost fourteen hours, I destroyed bales upon bales of old journals and writings, some of which dated back twenty-five years. I surrendered my history, my so-called “life story.”

I had wanted to burn them all for more than a year, ever since reading The Power of Now had led me to discard, recycle, or give away most of my belongings and reams of old files in an act I called “the purge.” I knew that those yellowing notebooks were packed full of miserable ruminations and regurgitations that had served only to aggravate and cultivate the chronic depression and self-loathing I had suffered throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I saw them as relics of a dead past I had no desire to keep alive any longer. (Besides which, I knew that if anything were to happen to me, they were the last thing I’d want my family to read.)

As I still hadn’t found a convenient and legal place to incinerate them, they had been sitting in two heavy boxes gathering dust in a corner of my apartment. Charged up with optimism after voting on Friday, I decided that there was no better time to dispense with them. On Saturday afternoon, armed with nothing more than a pair of kitchen scissors, I began pulling off the cardboard covers and shredding the pages into vertical strips. By the time I was finally finished Sunday night, I had filled six large shopping bags with recyclable materials.

Along the way, I read passages here and there, revisiting the memory of my younger self. At times I felt shame at her naïveté and utter self-absorption; at others I was embarrassed by her ill-informed grandstanding. What surprised me most about the writing, however, was how much of the content was redundant, and how little of the style was as good as I had thought at the time. This was no great loss to the literary canon, believe me!

Its greatest value, I would have to say, lay in its ability to demonstrate the extreme acrobatics of a deeply insecure and thoroughly hyperactive ego. “The tongue caresses these exacerbations,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “…like a hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.” That more or less sums up my collected works.
**

There were only a few things I found worth salvaging. Some of what I pulled out I’ll reproduce here, starting with a Walt Whitman quote I’d all but forgotten, but which is still entirely relevant:

Why are there men and women that while they are
        nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy
        sink flat and lank?

What was I just saying last time?

Speaking of such men and women, I got to rediscover my first impression of my college boyfriend (and first love) León Arenas at our freshman orientation assembly.

A young man stands up. His stance is slightly slumped, head and pelvis thrust slightly forward, hands in pockets, with what could be called a cocky air. Adding to this is his distinctive clothing — a black T-shirt and light yellow pants with white suspenders. His brown hair falls above his ears by reason of its wave, but he has a sort of forelock tumbling rakishly over his right brow. His jaw is lean and wolfish. He has a lanky attractiveness about him.

“Yes…I was wondering…for those of us who plan to go to graduate school, and are worried about grades…”

Here, an appreciative chuckle from those in the audience worried about grades; confident of his audience, he continues, smacking of wiseguy/class clown: “I know math isn’t my best subject, and I’m sure there are people here wondering whether it’s their efforts that are going to be recognized…or just what they produce.” He strokes his chin for dramatic effect. Students are tittering at the weaselly question, and the asker’s awareness of its weaselliness.

Across the aisle, I’m thinking: Oh, Lord, and I thought I’d gotten away from this kind when I left high school. Stay away from this hotshot, he’s annoying, and probably full of himself.

Yellow suspender pants perpetuates this image at convocation: students traverse the stage to shake the president’s hand and sign a registry. He not only shakes the president’s hand but at the same time gives a little bow and clicks his heels together, eliciting titters yet again.

He was an attention whore, sure, but I loved him. And after spending fourteen hours reading over my own obsessive self-dissections, I know I’ve got no business calling anyone else narcissistic. (I used up a couple of volumes suffering excruciatingly and verbosely when my Argentinian smartass broke up with me and affixed himself to one of my best friends.)

**
Also among those thousands of pages were some of my sophomoric attempts at erotica. Much of it bodice-ripper-grade, and fueled largely by my vast frustration. Back in the days of the first Clinton term, when Kurt Cobain was still alive and everyone was wearing flannel, I scribbled this R-rated paragraph. It isn’t as graphic as some of my other passages, but it’s better written.

I confess: I respond to beauty in men. Beauty of a particular — perhaps peculiar — sort, but beauty nonetheless. I want them. All of them. I want a smorgasbord of slackers. I want a grunge buffet. Pure pleasure, to run my hands through and smell their tousled locks, caress their stubbled faces, and breathe in the strong healthy scent that the skin and even the breath of such men have…to feel the definition in their hard, lean muscles and rub my cheek against the silken sworls of hair on their bellies, and lower, lower still…Ah, the smell of a man’s sex in warm denim. The animal in the cotton. It sleeps there in a mound, hibernating. I like to see it there, to know that it is there, whether or not he is going to let me touch it, wake it up. When I know that he is not, and I can see that it is there, it makes me crazy.

I hope that at least puts François’ doubts about me to rest.
**

There were a few surprises in the mix, and odd moments of edgy levity. I was particularly delighted to find this little ditty, written as it must have been while I was sick in my noisy tenement apartment. I had forgotten all about it; it made me laugh.

FLU AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

The bass from the alley neighbor
drills its beat into my bed;

the taxicab driver in number six
is walking on my head;

burrowed beneath my pillows, there’s
no rest for my aching brain;

no wonder no more why it’s always the poor
who kill, or go insane.

I do remember writing the following not-quite-nursery-rhyme in my thirties to a twenty-four-year-old who flirted outrageously with me but never made good on his threats or even returned my nervous calls. He was full of clever jokes and bravado, but in retrospect I think he may have been more nervous than I was.

AGE-APPROPRIATE VERSES

You pocket your posy,
my little boy blue.

‘It’s mine, you can’t have it,
so go suck on poo.’

It’s all games and nonsense
and nyah-nyah to you.

Nothing is serious
when you’re brand-new.

Crow’s-feet and varicose veins,
boo-hoo-hoo.

Worms will have eaten me
before you do.

That’s not really much worse than Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which is ostensibly about the Black Death. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down?

But it’s this piece of relative doggerel that sums up the entire bitter AlienBaby oeuvre in four short stanzas:

EVERYTHING GOES ALL TO HELL

Those lips that first kissed me, for hours on end,
soon made excuses, excusing themselves,
soon told me how he loved her well.
Everything goes all to hell.

Once, I was happy when she would call,
until grievance and blame and demand coerced me
to give her far more than I had to sell.
Everything goes all to hell.

He begged for love or scorn. The first
felt right. And Christ, but his eyes were blue.
Now he makes me watch him court young belles.
Everything goes all to hell.

When they dredge me up from the reedy depths
Blue and bloated like a manatee,
those who knew me best won’t say “She fell.”
Everything goes all to hell.

Nothing like a little suicide fantasy with your fatalism.

**

The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was a long-forgotten passage written after one of the most heartbreaking “misses” of my twenties. Luke Taylor and I might really have been something, if either one of us had had the courage to put ourselves out there and not just bluff and duck (I’m a master at the hit-and-run). Luke was a gentle giant of a guy, lovely in his ragged hippie way, with whom I could discuss Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. He had a broad vocabulary when it came to his emotions, and when I looked in his clear, kind eyes I felt somehow at home. Reading that part of my story again, I could see how we circled each other for months like uncertain animals, each waiting for the other to do or say something definitive. The openings Luke gave me, I blew, paralyzed by the prospect that my actions might actually have an effect. I was frankly terrified about what might happen. Maybe he was, too. Eventually he moved away to New York to be with a woman who wasn’t afraid to ask for him. I wonder where he wound up, and whether he’s happy. I hope he is.

I remember being crushed at the time, however, and crying a lot, grieving the loss of a good connection that I knew intuitively could have been amazing. What I don’t remember is writing this after he was gone:

Tonight, I felt strength. More than that, I felt something like greatness. By that I mean, I felt bigger than anything that was happening to me. Without even considering the future — how I hate those well-intentioned advisings of ‘it will get better’ and ‘you’ll meet someone!’ — I found myself in a present where both nothing and everything were, at once, possible. Walking the tightrope of paradox, I was powerless and all-powerful. I had nothing, but because I had nothing I had everything. Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ makes sense to me! Finally I understand…the deathbed revelations of Prince Andrei, the postwar epiphany of Pierre Bezukhov (in War and Peace). To love everyone is to love no one in particular, is to be supremely free…I feel again the strength and fearlessness of having nothing to lose, and I can at last speak my mind. How many people, do you suppose, have felt that liberated fearlessness?

This is not the sort of revelation I used to have back then. I was never one for living in the present, or for feeling fearless. It goes without saying that this was long before I ever picked up Eckhart Tolle! But I had definitely had some kind of firsthand experience of presence, nonduality, and even transcendence here; I was describing something in language used by spiritual teachers I had not yet read, something I hadn’t understood when I encountered versions of it in classic literature. In contrast to all the incessant why-me left brain activity characterizing the majority of my twenty-five-year diary, the above paragraph stood out like a neon sign. It was like an intimation of awarenesses to come, awarenesses that would eventually lead to my active destruction of these same diaries.

Ironically, losing Luke seems to have led to the loss of the fear that in all likelihood contributed directly to his loss in the first place. If only I could have found that expansive space of equanimity before! I can rarely find it now, still invested as I am in outcomes, in doing or saying the right thing, and still taking everything personally — in other words, still living mentally in the past or future. Today I might be a little more aware of the necessity of separating Luke from my anxious need for something from Luke. The higher you make the stakes, the more fear can enter, and fear is the greatest obstacle to love.

At any rate, I will no longer be hoarding the painful stories of my past. They sit, ready to be hauled away, lacerated beyond recognition in six jumbo shopping bags. Good riddance to my mopey opus! I am bigger than anything that has happened to me.

Something African-Americans have known since this nation’s inception, and which the election of President Obama confirms.

President Obama. I love saying that.

At the risk of sounding crazy (when has that ever stopped me?) I’ll divulge that I was seized by dark, self-destructive thoughts and urges all during that week myself, and that they were at their depressive worst on Friday. My more psychically inclined friends are convinced there’s a direct connection; I don’t know about that, but I marvel at the synchronicity.

Friday evening, in fact, I found myself contemplating the feasibility of emptying a pint of whisky and going down to the railyards by the river to wait for one of those freight trains that come clacking and wailing through the city late at night, so I could throw myself under it in the dark (properly anaesthetized), and no one would be the wiser until daybreak. Maybe even write ‘DNR’ in permanent magic marker across my chest, just for good measure. (What, after all, could be worse than a botched attempt, and the pity and disfigurement and permanent disability that might attend it?)

While I was entertaining this morbid little scenario in my head, an hour behind me in California David was tying the noose.

At the time, of course, I had no idea. Now before you go calling the paramedics, let me say that I hadn’t felt quite that self-destructive for a while. Besides, I suspect (if the wildly popular PostSecret blog is any gauge) that such thoughts are far more prevalent (even “normal”) than most people will admit. If my confession shocks you, I’m probably just breaking a cultural taboo. At any rate, by Saturday night I had shifted out of that frame of mind, and that’s when I read the news. A sharp shiver passed through my entire body, and sudden sadness landed in my chest with a leaden thud. Writing a few initial words about him on my blog, I shed tears for this relative stranger.

**

David Foster Wallace. In the rare taped interview, he appeared as a 90s grunge-nerd, like the unassuming bassist in the garage band, with his ubiquitous bandanna and his long hair, pale, bespectacled, soft-spoken, betraying the occasional tic and stammer, clearly ill at ease with the camera’s eye. He reminded me of so many of my classmates at St. John’s College, the “Great Books school,” which by virtue of its curriculum attracted brilliant, serious, abstracted, entirely non-materialistic young men whose greatest passion in life was thinking. I could definitely see myself staying up with David in the basement coffee shop of McDowell Hall until one in the morning discussing Hume. (I would probably have been mentally jogging and panting to keep up with the long strides of his churning mind.) He would have been a friend for sure. Not a lover, I think, but a good friend. If I talk about him, then, with too great a familiarity, forgive me — he just felt so familiar.

Well versed in the ways of postmodern academia and its infatuation with irony and avant-garde arcana and snark, David (who could way out-footnote Nabokov) demonstrated an unfashionable commitment to sincerity and authenticity and (what he called in his 1996 conversation with Salon) “that feeling in the stomach, which is why we read.” He wanted to create work that challenged his readers intellectually while making them feel “like someone was talking to (them) rather than striking a number of poses.” Newsweek wrote a fine elegy shedding light upon the “terrible master” that was David’s teeming brain; I won’t reiterate everything here, but suffice it to say that while he emphatically believed that solipsism — the generally empirically sound conclusion that one’s own perceiving consciousness is, in fact, the center of the universe — is a sucky orientation to call home, he also acknowledged the terrible loneliness of being a singular, bounded, perceiving consciousness. Writing and reading were a way of reaching out.

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

This has always been my take, bounded as I feel within the walls of my own infernally solitary unit of human consciousness. How jealous I am of those fluid, blissful, mystic types who claim to experience the seamless oneness of all things! My circumscribed brain more often than not feels like a prison — a prison where I am intermittently but masterfully tortured.

I’ll wager it was similar for David, who urged the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College to avoid “getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head” — the advice of many a Zen master and spiritual teacher — and went on to say

…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

What was happening in my own brain those few dark days last week was a constant monologue of repetitive and despairing thoughts masquerading as the only truth. A longtime sufferer of depression myself, I’m skeptical of all the strictly biochemical explanations for it, including those that go swirling around in the wake of suicides. Comparative religion scholar Huston Smith, among others, has observed that just because we can describe something scientifically doesn’t mean we have isolated its cause (or made full sense of it). The explanation that has always made the most sense to me is that we assist and perpetuate certain chemical cocktails within our brains when we travel well-worn synaptic paths that trigger stressful emotions. Drugs can interrupt this process and fuzz out the distress, but they don’t really address its origins.

Imagine having a brain capable of grasping every reason on earth to despair — on 24-hour overdrive. I have no doubt, too, given my comparatively modest intellect and my nevertheless oversized ego, that David’s own intense self-consciousness must have only magnified his suffering. (See The Albatross of Personal Importance for more on ego-driven suffering.) Talking to Charlie Rose, he frequently flinched and grimaced when he finished making a point, as if his incisive formulations were embarrassingly inadequate. Shame and grandiosity are the flip-side extremes within perfectionistic, hierarchical minds that tend to turn the merciless spotlight on themselves…

Grappling with isolation, despair, dread, personal inadequacy — how is it possible not to be “totally hosed?”

**

According to David, by exercising some choice over “how and what you think.” Fine advice, so it would seem, though much easier said than done. He was suggesting, as psychologists and spiritual teachers have, that we use our minds more consciously, and choose what we pay attention to.

But I’m starting to entertain the possibility, again, that this is not enough. That this is just another ploy to sustain an unsustainable status quo. (It wasn’t sustainable for him, after all.) I’m starting to wonder if I’ve let the clarity of an initial ‘aha’ more than a year ago become muddied by the assurances of those who insist I can have my cake and ego too — whether it’s the manifest-your-desires crowd or others who argue that my constructed self (or selves, as the case may be) really isn’t essentially a “parasite” that could eventually kill me. Based on how I felt that Friday, I’m pretty sure it could, and I’m not talking about just one overly zealous critical aspect of it.

You see, I felt like I’d hit a vein of gold when I first read “The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.” In a few sentences, Eckhart Tolle managed to negate the mountains of self-help literature, psychology, philosophy, positive-thinking new-agey type books, and religious dogma I’d plowed my way through over the years to no avail. “The study of madness is not enough to create sanity.”

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.

I don’t know if a craving for some sort of recognition motivated David, although I do know that he told Charlie Rose that when he got it, he found that it changed nothing, and that people still didn’t recognize what he thought was important, anyway. This is interesting to those of us still laboring away under the impression that “success” will make some kind of major difference in our lives. What constitutes this effing “success,” anyway? William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch as an attempt to get Allen Ginsberg to come back to him. He wound up with multiple accolades and acolytes, but no Allen. For old Bill, that may have meant failure.

I know all about that kind of failure. (My motto could be “Those who can, live; those who can’t, write.”) But what I’m trying to say is that all of this anxiety-ridden achievement (or lack thereof) is measured with a yardstick provided by the tireless but tiresome ego. I need, I crave, I hate…am I this or that enough? Am I better or worse than you? Will I ever get what I want/deserve? Who wins and who loses?

**

By chance I recently picked up a strange pink-lettered book on Kabbalah (it was free, at a festival) the thesis of which is that the root of all evil is “the desire to receive for the self alone.” This desire is known as the “Opponent” (can you say ego?), who keeps us locked up in a prison of suffering. In order to escape this prison (and “become like God”) we must practice “transformative sharing.” The greater the discomfort this sharing creates, the better it’s working to destroy the desire to receive for the self alone.

I have to say, Rabbi Berg’s clown suit story kind of got to me. He tells the story of a famous Kabbalist who goes out walking with a companion and smells the scent of the Garden of Eden wafting from a house. They go inside to investigate, and find that this wonderful scent is coming from a clown suit in the back of the owner’s closet. When they ask him about it, he blushes and recounts the following story.

The man had been trying to help a friend in financial straits, and had attempted to take up a collection among their neighbors. Failing to collect more than a pittance, he went to a local tavern where he encountered a table full of wealthy, drunken men. One of them offered to give him all the money his friend needed — on the condition that he don a clown suit and parade around the town with the lot of them in the wee hours, singing and shouting and waking up the townspeople. He reluctantly agreed to be part of this Fellini-esque scene. Of course, the angry townspeople hollered obscenities out of their windows and even emptied their chamber pots on him, and he was thoroughly disgraced in front of every last person he knew — but he obtained the money for his friend. He ran home in shame and threw the suit in the back of his closet.

When the man had finished his story, the Kabbalist looked at him with bright eyes. “That explains why this extraordinary fragrance was coming from your closet,’ he said. “Your sharing action shattered your ego so completely that a tremendous amount of Light was revealed. Indeed, so powerful is the protection that even after your death it will continue. Tell your family to bury you in the suit when you die, for it will give you immediate admission into the Garden of Eden.”

**

One of the things that makes me feel like disappearing is a feeling of perpetual humiliation. Sometimes I start to view my entire past as nothing more than a series of indignities both great and small, a sort of decades-long hazing, while my present appears to be only a ripe opportunity for more of the same. Underlying this nearly intolerable feeling is the thwarted egoic craving to be respected, sought after, esteemed and desired, and to get what I want for a change, regardless of whether it costs anyone else. Gimmeeeeeee! Despairing of this, I actually start to question whether life is worth living.

The assumption that gives rise to such a question is that life is about getting what’s coming to you (“receiving for the self alone”). Certainly this is quintessentially American. (Just look at the wonders it’s worked on Wall Street!) What hit me so hard reading the Kabbalah story was the idea that relinquishing this assumption can be a painful and humiliating, but perhaps ultimately worthwhile, process. What if everything I’ve regarded as a failure, slight, or slap in the face has been a necessary step toward not “coming into my own,” but getting out of myself? What if sharing what (credit, responsibilities, attention, people) I don’t want to share is exactly what I need to do?

When we live in ego nature, sharing is an unnatural act. Sharing violates the ego’s fundamental survival need: I want it for myself. This is a deep, dark pit, an unscratchable itch, a bottomless longing destined never to be filled.

David once (a bit too presciently, perhaps) noted that suicides often shoot themselves in the head — the location of that “terrible master.” I would add — maybe what they really intended to kill, however unconsiously, was their ego.

I, for one, am sick to death of mine. Tired of the same old thoughts, obsessions, anxieties, criticisms, and unsatisfied wants.

Hand me those big red Bozo shoes, Rabbi.

I had been reading a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron — When Things Fall Apart, or was it The Wisdom of No Escape? — and some subatomic particle of wisdom must have penetrated my hard head. I remember walking down the street on a sunny day, lost in my usual obsessive and negative thoughts — why me, why me? — when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I looked up at the blue sky and thought, I am not that important.

All at once my anxiety dispersed, as if by magic. For several hours thereafter I remained in a state of calm and (dare I say it?) peace.

This was wholly counter-intuitive. I grew up in America, dammit, land of Davy Crockett and Horatio Alger and libertarianism. Isn’t the individual the measure of all things? Isn’t the whole point of life to distinguish ourselves from the herd, and to get our piece of the apple pie? Or to make it onto the cover of People magazine?

And then there was my upbringing in evangelical Christianity, which teaches us twice-born kids from birth that we’re so very special, our separate, unique little godfearing selves are so utterly important to our Heavenly Father, that He sent His Only Son just to die on our behalf so that our disembodied personalities wouldn’t fry eternally in the lake of fire with the godless heathens (who aren’t very special at all, apparently. Unless you’re a missionary or something).

Add to that some accelerated early learning — I was labeled as a “gifted” child, and did schoolwork two grades ahead for the first several of my elementary years — and, presto! you have a recipe for borderline megalomania. If Americans are superior to the rest of the world’s citizens, and Christians are superior to the legions of nonbelievers populating this evil planet, and “gifted” children are superior to their idiot classmates who do age-appropriate work, then I was la creme de la creme. I was Supergirl. I was way more important than you, you poor slob.

Thus I started off my life journey completely identified with things that made me “special.” Things that made me need to guard my turf, to oppose, to compete. Things that could be taken away from me at a moment’s notice.

And that’s exactly what happened. Other kids surpassed me in school. My ossified faith crumbled to ashes. I failed to make money or headlines, to pull myself up by my red-white-and-blue bootstraps. My self-esteem took a nosedive. The flip side of grandiosity, after all, is inferiority.

Eastern faith traditions like Buddhism (as well as modern mystics like Eckhart Tolle) recognize all of this as the activity of the ego, the constructed self that strives to maintain the illusion of separateness. It feeds on feelings of personal importance, and thrives on grievances and the need to be right. Anything that strengthens that sense of individual special-ness or better-ness is good, to the ego. Unfortunately, its constant internal monologues can create a monstrous tunnel vision, eliminating all perspective and sense of proportion. Ego concerns can dominate a person’s entire consciousness, to the exclusion of anything and everything else that might be going on.

Case in point: there I was, on a beautiful summer day, obsessing and ruminating miserably about my past and all its repetitive, seemingly insurmountable failures. For me, the sky may as well have been pitch black and raining down hailstones. Consumed by despair, I think I was actually contemplating suicide.

And then, the miraculous thought: I am not that important.

In that moment, my massive, dark, bloated, all-consuming ego deflated like a stuck balloon.

The pressure was off. Pressure to live up to expectations, whether they were my family’s or my peers’ or my own; pressure to do something, for god’s sake, and get it right; pressure to solve the never-ending and intractable problem of AlienBaby. Was the earth going to stop turning on its axis if I didn’t get my act together? Who the hell did I think I was?!

All those frenzied thoughts, all their well-worn circuits of self-blame and self-pity, just ceased. I had obliterated their underlying operating assumption. If my strictly individual concerns and desires and achievements really weren’t the be-all end-all in the grand scheme of things, then why expend so much energy? Why create so much distress?

It was radical, to me, coming from where I came from. It was a relief.

…

Many times since, personal importance, the labored machinations of my overactive ego, have more often that not been the prime culprit when I’ve fallen into the heavy quicksand of depression and the sticky sinkholes of despair.

If you’re like me, you may find that when you don’t get the job, the promotion, the coveted affection and attention of a certain person, your sense of specialness is mortally affronted. Why haven’t I “won?” And who, then, is the superior candidate? What often doesn’t help matters is that your friends, relatives, and colleagues, who care about you and have your best interests at heart, may collaborate with your ego and encourage you to think that you deserve X more than someone else because you are better. (Your fear, of course, is that you are worse!) How many times have we sat over coffee with friends, bemoaning the phony bastard who sucked up to the boss or the shallow bitch who got the guy? There would be no plot to most romantic comedies were it not for this need for somebody (e.g. the sweet underdog suitor) to be “better.” Professional sports franchises might likewise languish and go out of business without the fierce identification of fans with a team they believe is superior to all others. (I’m not saying people wouldn’t still enjoy the game, but the more fanatical manifestations of such identification would have no impetus.)

Let’s be frank: a rather nerve-wracking ego investment in being Number One is ingrained deeply into our collective American psyche (USA! USA!), and no one ever wants to be the “loser.”

But the game theme is perhaps a good one to stick with. Some of the more (to my mind) “enlightened” individuals on our planet, like Tolle, author Don Miguel Ruiz, and the wonderful Roz and Ben Zander, have suggested in one way or another that everything in life can and should be treated as a game, albeit not a high-stakes one. (I think my new friend Pablo would say the same.) Their focus is upon gentle experimentation and lighthearted play, upon the appreciation of the richness, texture, and variety of all that exists on the “game board” of life, rather than an attachment to getting some nifty prize in the end. Engagement, to these seemingly happier souls, is much more vital than outcome.

Within this alternate framework, we might start to loosen the clenched fists of ego, of our own personal importance and our need to win, thereby becoming more capable of holding gently and then releasing whatever cards the present moment deals us. We could perhaps enjoy the game of life, without taking it all so personally.

Playing this way would require of us greater patience, kindness, and awareness. Unlike our usual games, this one presupposes cooperation rather than competition.

But anyone and everyone could play, if they were willing to take off their platform shoes.