Of Monsters and Men

Feb6

Well,my attempts to change my inner self talk to positive statements are failing laughably. How are yours going? For every, “I’m strong!” and “I can do this!” several dozen, “I can’t take it”s and “It’s too much”es creep in.

We had a book when I was five or six called The Monster at the end of this book. On the first pages, Grover reads the title of the book and gets scared. He doesn’t want to see the monster! So he comes up with the plan that we — he and the reader — just won’t turn the pages. If we don’t turn them, we’ll never get to the monster, and we’ll be safe. Of course you, the reader, keep turning the pages, and Grover gets more and more frustrated with you, and more and more panicky as you get closer to the end. It’s hilarious.

When my mom started to read it to me, *I* got scared. I was firmly in Grover’s camp. DON’T TURN THE PAGES MOMMY! I remember crying hysterically until she hid the book safely away in the top of a closet. It wasn’t until we moved when I was almost eight that we remembered the book was there, and found out that *SPOILER ALERT* — GROVER was the monster at the end of the book all along! “I, loveable, furry old Grover am the monster at the end of the book. And you were so SCARED.” Well, yes, Grover, I was.

Back to the almost present, three days ago, when the snow piles and consequent traffic was so ridiculous that I decided to take the bus to work instead of drive. The bus was right on time, I thought, till a fellow passenger told me that it was actually the one that was supposed to come an hour ago — she knew because she’d been waiting that long. Once I got on the heated bus I shed my hat and gloves and unknowingly dropped my sunglasses on the floor. A kind, middle-aged, gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and handed them to me, sparking a train of thought about the goodness of most people and how we still help each other out even when we are stressed. Then the same man suddenly yelled out the window,

“F**K YOU, MONSTER STORM!!”

before lapsing back into a meditative silence. The rest of the passengers looked over in brief surprise, and then went back to their own thoughts and lives.

Yesterday I drove again because I had to take the little girl I nanny to school. The roads were — are — still awful. Many two-way streets are reduced to one narrow lane with walls of snow on either side. Tempers are running short all around. The three mile drive to the girl’s school took almost half an hour. I thought I was handling the stress pretty well, but looked down after a particularly stressful incident involving a taxi and saw that I had chewed my thumbnail down till my finger bled.

Then, amidst all the honking and close calls, a woman tried to merge in front of a man behind me and he got angry. He jumped out of his car, leaving it sitting empty on a busy, four lane street, and started yelling and swearing at the woman — and then pulling on her door handle! It was terrifying. I opened my door to try to help — talk him down, or call the police, or take a picture of his license plate or something — but realized I couldn’t leave the little girl alone. I had my phone out to call the police, but before I could the man jumped back in his car and drove off.

There has been more snow in the past two weeks than Boston’s average for the entire winter. And another foot or more is coming this weekend. I feel like shouting, like Grover, “STOP TURNING THE PAGES!” Or maybe borrowing the exclamation of the gentleman on the bus. If we could stop turning the pages, maybe we could stop the snow from falling, and maybe that would stop the monster from coming. But, in the end, if it turns out that the monster was only ourselves all along, would that be any better? I already bit my own hand — what damage will I do if the snow keeps coming? And the man who leaped, roaring, out of his car — what will his monster do if we get to the end of the book? I am scared to find out.

Self-talk

Feb3

Sisyphus by Titian, and how I feel about this winter

Snow, snow, and more snow. I am about to head out to my nanny job and it is 8 degrees out, -16 with the wind. For the past week I have had a refrain running through my head, almost subconsciously: “I can’t handle this, it’s too much, it’s too much.” This winter is hitting me hard all of a sudden.

But while it’s true that I feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the winter and all it entails (see my last post, Boston in January), I want to be aware of that inner dialogue and take control of it. That *is* how I feel, but it’s not helpful to let it become my narrative. So I am trying, every time I notice myself thinking, “I can’t take it,” to replace it with a truth that strengthens rather than weakens.

“I am strong.” “I have made it through worse than this.” “I can’t handle the whole winter, but I can handle the work right in front of me today, and that is all I have to do right now.” Those are the inner truths that strengthen me, and what it’s helpful to focus on.

And, also, these: “We are closer to April than November.” “Sunset tonight is 5:01 pm,” (after two months of 4-something sunsets) “The average historical temperature in Boston is one degree warmer than it was two weeks ago.” “Spring is coming, it really is.” “Hang in there.”

Do you have “negative self-talk” swirling through your mind? What is it? What are some truths you can replace it with today?

Boston in January

Jan30

wickedbigstorm Late January — This is the time of year that winter always starts to feel too much for me. I thought I was making it through pretty unscathed this year: We’d had almost no snow so far here in Boston, which meant no shoveling, no scrabbling for precious, hard-dug-out parking spaces, no arguing with neighbors about the proper way to pile up the snow. But all that changed — and changed dramatically — this week with what one meteorologist said was the sixth biggest snowstorm in Boston in recorded history. Before it even came it caused tension in my house over an unregistered car that our subletter had been storing for months, without permission, in the driveway. Our landlords, my housemate, and the downstairs tenants who share the driveway all wanted it moved and the snowstorm brought the issue to a head. I felt that if it wasn’t moved before the snowstorm it was going to be stuck there till March or April. The subletter couldn’t find the title and was apologetic but refused to move it before he got it registered. I pushed the issue more than I would have if it weren’t for the coming storm, and emotions were high all around.

I shared with my writer’s group that it had been a hard day, and one of them said, “If a tough life is a good story, then maybe… a tough day is a good blog post?” I replied, “Yeah, it may be a good blog post some day. Right now if I wrote about it it would be too much Why I Am Right And The Other Guy Is An Idiot. I *am* and he *is* 😉 but I’ve got to wait till I get to a deeper truth than that.”

Then the storm came and things just kept getting worse. We had more disagreements with our subletter over how to shovel, because there is just so little room to put all that snow. Our neighbor once again expressed disapproval about how we were shoveling. Another neighbor’s van took up one and a half parking spaces, so I couldn’t use the spot I’d dug out. And I heard from my mom that she’d fell and hurt herself, and was taking longer than expected to recover. Now it is snowing again, and more coming on Monday. We haven’t come to a consensus with our subletter about the shoveling, and the snow piles keep getting higher. I came up to my parents’ to help them out and take my mom to her chiropractor’s appointment but we had to cancel the appointment because the roads are so bad. I re-injured my knee — not in the snow, but still. And the headlight on my car went out.

It just keeps piling up, literally and figuratively. Roads are narrower, driving anywhere takes twice as long, and parking is next to impossible, even if you have put a chair in the street to save your spot. People are just tense. This is a hard time of year.

So what is the deeper truth in all of this? I’m not sure, but I think a couple of things are true. The first, I think, is the same lesson I keep coming back to: Conflict is just part of the human condition. People are going to disagree and get frustrated at each other no matter what. There is no perfect amount of action or inaction, passivity or assertion, speaking or keeping quiet that can avoid this. There is no perfect thing to do or say that will avert all conflict. I question whether I should have pushed our subletter so much, but at the same time I feel like I had genuine concerns that it was okay for me to express. In any case, it’s time to let it go and move on. The endless post-game , play by play analysis is too exhausting.

And, second, I think that none of us should be judged by how we behave in New England in late January. We are worn out and weary and not at our best. So I will take a deep breath and forgive myself, and then try to extend that grace to others. And I will try to find things to laugh at. Like this:

If Dunkin’ Donuts is closing, you know it’s serious.

Driving west

Jan24

The Infinite Recognition by René Magritte

My friend and I were driving from Boston to Connecticut late one afternoon, and the sun was bright in the western sky. It was my car, but he was driving. He usually scorned sunglasses, this friend, but I had an old pair in the glove compartment that I offered him, and, after squinting into the sun for a while, he put them on. They were the kind that somehow make things look brighter and more defined.

As we drove on, the clouds were gathered in one of those spectacular pre-sunset displays, cirrus, stratus, and cumulus layered on top of each other with sunlight streaming through them.

“Those clouds are beautiful,” my friend said, and I agreed.

A few minutes later he said, “Those clouds are really gorgeous! I mean, look at the layers! I’ve never seen clouds like this before!”

“It’s really lovely,” I agreed. And it was. He was excited and happy, and I enjoyed his happiness. He struggles with depression as well as other serious health issues, and it is nice to see a tiny bit of joy break through. And the only thing better than watching the unfolding of a gorgeous sunset is watching it with a friend who is enjoying it as much as you.

I think he had forgotten he had the sunglasses on. I decided not to tell him that the clouds were the regular, everyday miracles, that the sunglasses were just helping him to see them better.

I just finished Madeleine L’Engle’s book The Summer of the Great Grandmother. It was written during the last months of her mother’s life, when she was suffering from what sounds like Altzeimer’s disease. Madeleine describes her teenage thoughts about what heaven must be like. She imagines a planet where the sentient beings do not have eyes, and cannot imagine what vision is, what it would be like to see. Then she imagines that when we die, “we might go to another planet, and there we might have a new sense, one just as important as sight, or even more important, but which we couldn’t conceive of now any more than we could conceive of sight if we didn’t know about it.”

Perhaps that’s what Paul meant when he wrote, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” Not another planet, maybe, but new eyes to see the one we already have. New eyes, or new hearts, or something we can’t even imagine yet. Maybe whatever it is will help us make sense of all the pain and darkness here on earth, the depression, disease, and death. In the meantime we see glimpses of it in the glory of the clouds at sunset, through our human, fallible eyes, through our contact lenses and glasses and sunglasses.

Accept, let go

Jan22

I was having a tough time this morning — not enough sleep, a cranky two year old that was making me feel like a bad nanny, and a difficult email conversation — and feeling anxious and like I needed to do something to make myself feel better. I ran through all the things that I could do and they mostly involved trying to get other people to make me feel better. I am totally in favor of the phone a friend option, but somehow this didn’t feel right to me today. If I hadn’t been with the little one I might have considered chemical options (only the legal ones, don’t worry!) Then I remembered one of the biggest lessons from yoga and life: Observe your feelings without judging them. I took a deep breath (another of yoga’s big lessons) and said, This is how I feel, and it’s okay. Suddenly my heart rate slowed, the anxiety lifted, and I had my perspective back. Those stressful things were still happening, but they didn’t control or define my day anymore.

I started a practice a year or so ago, when I was struggling with some difficult memories, of breathing in deeply, and my in-breath represented full acceptance of myself and everyone else involved in the memories. As I breathed in I acknowledged that I had done my best, despite my mistakes and weaknesses, and everybody else had probably done their best too. The air expanded my lungs and made room to allow me to be who I was, and others in my past to be who they were. Then I exhaled, and that represented letting go of the pain and hurt, that had been done to me, and that I had done to others. Breathe in — accept. Breathe out — let go.

I try, also, to do the same thing with stress, anxiety, or feelings that are just too much. Breathe in — observe and accept. Breathe out — let go. I think this is similar to what Glennon Doyle Melton is expressing when she says, “Everything beautiful comes from our ability to sit still with our discomfort.” If we are brave enough to be quiet and not try to fix our feelings, or distract ourselves from them, or chase them away with a glass of wine or a pill, we might discover that they won’t actually destroy us. They probably will even have something to teach us.

Esther Ekhart has a wonderful explanation non-attachment. I’m not sure if you have to be a subscriber to watch the video, here is the link to it anyway. She says that true non-attachment doesn’t remove you from the world around you, but rather frees you up to fully engage with it.

The two year old is napping now, and will hopefully wake up less cranky. I’ll probably feel kind of crummy later since I’m not napping, but that’s okay. As long as I remember to breathe in and out I’ll be okay.

Apology from the author to her protagonist

Jan20

A Forest in Winter by Pieter Lodewijk Francisco Kluyver

Look at you, standing faithfully on the page, ready, waiting for my least command. The smallest word from me will tell you what to do next, what to say and how to say it, in first person or third, sadly or with joy.

You would do anything for me, despite your pride: That was going to be your fatal flaw, in the third act, I had it all planned out.

But, unfortunately – I don’t quite know how to say this – I won’t be using you. No, listen, it’s not you, it’s me. I mean, you’re brilliant, really, even if I do say so myself. Your back-story alone is pure genius: Your tortured childhood, the unrequited love of your college days. You’re just great. If anything you’re too good for me. You deserve a writer who can make you famous – a Milton or a Homer.

Me, I’m only now discovering how bad I am. I mean, look at where you are now – in the Black Forest of Germany on a winter’s night. With a character like you, and a setting like that, a monkey could write something thrilling. I should have you tramping through the forest, feverish from a bayonet wound, Quixotically slashing at trees as you search for your battalion to warn them of an enemy attack. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be perfect for it.

Instead, I’ve spent the last two weeks hung up on describing the snow! Which I can’t do! I mean, I’m trying to write a dramatic novel here, and I keep ending up sounding like Dr. Seuss. The woods were old, the snow was cold… Or else I come up with something amazing only to realize that I’m pretty much quoting Robert Frost. I’m not kidding, this has happened twice: First with “lovely, dark and deep,” and then, a few days later, with “easy wind and downy flake.”

And then I start thinking, I will never be as good as Robert Frost, or anywhere close. I might as well sell my typewriter and use the money to order cable TV. Or maybe go on American Idol, I mean I’m bound to be a better singer than writer.

So I thought I should let you know. I’m sorry about all of this. I had a wonderful time with you, and I wish you all the best. I’ll always remember you the way you are now, stopping in the woods on a snowy evening.