Presence

It's hard to have perspective on my own life when I'm in the middle of it. Like everyone, I'm a complex creature with a lot of emotions and tendencies that pull on me and interact with each other. And it's a real challenge to try to get to the eye of that storm, to the calm center where all of those forces are peripheral and there is a sense of the true direction in which I'm headed. I have friends who, like me, are going through particular challenges in their lives now, and it's often easier for me to give them calm and reasonable advice than it is for me to take the same advice to heart myself. This works the other way around, too. I have a friend who has listened to some of my recent frustrations and anxieties and responded that I should take time to remember what I've accomplished up to now, all that I've been doing that I'm not giving myself credit for. And that I should also bear in mind that things won't be this way forever, that it's a trying time right now but I'm continually moving in the right direction -- it just takes time to realize all of the changes. But this same friend who gave me such encouragement about my situation and decisions is having a hard time seeing past the immediate troubles in their life as well and seeing that there are brighter times ahead, in spite of the fact that this is what they have told me. Sometimes what lies between us and the payoff seems so daunting, and it's difficult to have the determination to persevere with a hopeful and optimistic spirit intact. But I think that's what we have each other for, to remind each other of the good in our lives and of the truth that the good is ultimately what will prevail.

On a related note, I read something encouraging yesterday, written by Thich Nhat Hanh in his book, The Energy of Prayer. In the third chapter, he discusses each line of the Lord's Prayer, and I particularly loved this section on being happy in the present, in spite of anxieties, from his comments on the line, "Give us today our daily bread":

In our daily life we have many anxieties. We have our cravings and we tend to want to store things up. We do not know that the present moment is important. Life can only be there in the present moment. If our only concern is to invest in tomorrow, then it would be easy to completely forget about he wonders of life in the present moment. We have to return to the present moment, to live it deeply and properly. We have to live in such a way that the kingdom of God is present here and now. This is a prayer that needs to be practiced twenty-four hours every day, because we want to live the present moment deeply in every second. The words of the prayer are not only to be read before we go to sleep; they have to be recited all day long.

We already have sufficient conditions to be happy today. We have to pray in such a way that we can be in touch with the conditions of happiness that are in us and around us. They're all there, available. We shouldn't be greedy. We shouldn't demand that life go on for hundreds and hundreds of years. How can life continue for hundreds of years if right in this present moment we are not able to be alive?

Looking Up

It's pretty incredible what a positive outlook can do. That sounds very sappy and self-helpy, but it's another one of the often-repeated bits of wisdom that has taken a long time to really start taking root in my brain, probably in large part because I tend to be dismissive of things that come across as overly sugar-coated. I'm a natural skeptic, and I gravitate toward the flaw in the logic that will dispel any illusions that things are picture perfect. I crave the realistic, the practical, and the honest -- if it's gritty or unpleasant, that's fine, so long as it's true.

But what I'm seeing now is that I can influence what is real and true through choosing my attitude. If I look for the flaw, I am going to find it. I almost can't help but notice the problems with just about everything at this point, because I am almost pathologically (and truth be told, also professionally) analytical, but I've started giving less weight to the part of everything that sucks. I've adjusted my expectations to account for suckage, and now it doesn't bother me as much when there's some drawback; I'm better at putting it into perspective, and I'm a lot happier for it.

Seeing

For the past few weeks I've been adjusting back to life in Chicago after seeing so many new places in the world, and it's been more challenging and less of a relief than I expected. I've found that it's difficult for me to be back among my fellow Americans because they haven't been removed from this place and haven't spent time looking at the world through so many different lenses, so I'm overwhelmed by all of the Americanness and the attitudes and behaviors that come with our nationality. I know that may sound snobby, but that's not my intention. This is not me trying to be high-minded and cosmopolitan; this is me feeling strangely because I don't feel totally at home now that I'm home again.

The reason for this feeling, I think, is that my way of thinking and seeing things has changed, thanks to all of the wonderful places I've visited and people I've met. And it's lonely not to have other people around who know what this is like. I can recount how much I loved Istanbul or Bali and people will listen interestedly, but it's still not real to them, they're just abstract, far-off places that sound exotic. I realized my loneliness existed when I was telling a colleague and her husband that I'm planning a trip back to India in January for a wedding. They visited India a few months back, also for a wedding, and then stayed for a while to visit various places around the country. So we were able to share some of our impressions during our respective time there, and I was so happy to talk with them about it and know they understand at least in part the experiences I've had.

I keep worrying that I'm going to sound uppity when I talk about how important traveling is to me and how much it has transformed me. But it's true, and it's actually been a really humbling experience to have the structures of my thinking challenged. I'm noticing things that would be difficult or impossible to pick up on without being immersed in environments where they are absent.

One of the things I've noticed is the way that so many Americans don't have, and in some cases also don't see a need to have, any real sense of the way life is elsewhere. We have a large country, and we have a lot of resources, and it seems that we feel entitled to the conveniences we're afforded. There also seems to be a sense that people from other countries are distant and different, which maybe comes partly from our geography (being separated from most other continents by huge expanses of ocean). I've been uncomfortable with the contrasts of extreme wealth and poverty in our world for a while, but now I really struggle when I hear conversations about the relative cleanliness of Chicago train lines (my beloved red line is consistently criticized, but it's the busiest line in the city and runs through neighborhoods with a wide range of income levels), the bother of being talked to by a homeless person, and where the best and safest places are to buy a condo in the city.

I guess it's that even these trivial examples give me a sense that what a lot of Americans really want is a metaphorical white picket fence with an enclosed place of safety where the dangers to our physical safety and to our dearly held world views are kept at a distance. And I see evidence of this in the news lately. For instance, some people are freaking out because a Muslim group wants to put a community center near the World Trade Center site in New York. There is a false equation of Islam with terrorism, and people are fearful of inviting terrorism back to that site. But what I see is that fear is being exploited for political gain at the expense of true understanding and peace. It's frustrating to me, because I just want everyone to get to know a few Muslim Americans and realize that different doesn't mean dangerous, and moreover, that they're not that different to begin with.

In any form of fundamentalism, whether religious or political, there are strict boundaries laid around the world that are based on limited information. I don't really fault people for missing information; we all do because it's impossible to know everything. But I am frustrated by willful ignorance that refuses to acknowledge truth if it is too challenging or inconvenient. I wish we could all have the humility to let our own assumptions be broken, but I know that's a difficult thing to do. I keep thinking of the Bible verse (which I had to look up, as I have to admit I'm no great memorizer of scriptures), "For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline." When we act in fear, we go into defensive mode against things that we feel threaten our accepted truths. Violence, oppression, and suppression result from this kind of defensiveness, which does nothing to promote the truth in love. If we really do experience the truth of God's love, I think it makes us realize that there's nothing we need to defend ourselves against, because we have faith that love is ultimately what wins out.

I've been going on about politics and religion and fear pretty abstractly, but in the end what I'm struggling to articulate is the way our perspectives change the more we allow ourselves to experience and see new things. And I think this applies both at a personal level, when people on the other side of the world become acquaintances and dear friends instead of distant strangers, and at a societal level, when we stop thinking of our own system of living as correct and see ourselves as citizens of a shared world.

Big Should-er

A wonderful thing about weekends is that I get to gorge myself on all of the deliciously open time that I have for a couple of days. I spend a lot of time alone, and I spend a decent proportion of my alone time walking -- to the coffee shop, to the grocery store, to the train, or just around the neighborhood, to nowhere in particular. And I find that the solitary walking time is some of my favorite time because I love being out in this great part of the city and the activity and life around me make my mind active and invigorated as well. I'm a natural introvert, so I find that if I've been spending most of my time working or socializing with other people, my nerves start to get frayed, resulting in stress and crankiness. When I get a chance to go for a morning walk after a really socially demanding few days or weeks, my brain just starts to chug through all of the stored-up experiences and thoughts that haven't had a chance to be explored or digested. It's easy for me to lose sight of the broader picture of my life and my emotional path when I'm trying to stay "on" continuously, and it's being alone that so often gives me the ability to piece together the context and themes of my experience.

One of the major themes I've been noticing lately is the dominance of the word "should" in my psyche. I've spent a lot of hours, days, and years agonizing over what I should do with my life. What's the right path so that I make a difference in the world? How can I live morally and do the least harm possible? What more could I be giving to help other people? These are good questions to ask myself, but the extent to which I've made them the central questions to guide my existence and the way in which I've responded to them have constituted a sort of fundamentalism. In some ways I traded one system of "should" -- a conservative religious upbringing in a tiny, traditional Midwestern town -- for another -- a progressive social consciousness in a diverse city. Whatever the ideological system I'm currently espousing, that's what I have let rule me, and I have strived to suppress my own desires in the interest of these beliefs. The thinking has been, what makes me feel entitled to indulge in any way if it is not right and good? And again, it's a good question in some sense -- it's good to be mindful of the impact of my actions. But there's a part that I have always left out of my consideration -- that what makes me happy matters, too. I want other people to be happy and have a strong sense that everyone is entitled to pursue what fulfills them, but somehow in my mind "everyone" has never included me. It was not until my therapist asked me (and this in my first session with her), "Why do you feel guilty for wanting to be happy?" that it occurred to me that in fact, I do feel guilty for wanting anything for myself. Mind you, this guilt hasn't led to me carrying out a flawless and morally pure existence -- it's just made me feel like a bad person for merely being human and having perfectly normal human failings.

In addition to my pervasive sense of guilt, or maybe as a result of it, I also find myself compelled to express myself as directly and honestly as possible and appreciative of people who are forthright. This may not seem like a direct cause-and-effect, but I think these two characteristics are related. A lot of my craving for honesty and directness is derived from a strong desire for outside information as validation of my thoughts and feelings. I am naturally oriented to be a sort of "info sponge", partly because of my love of learning (a positive motive) and partly because of my insecurity (not such a great motive). I don't want to do anything wrong, so I pay attention to people's thoughts and behaviors and use them to gauge what I should do. It seems odd for someone as defiant of norms as I often am to be so concerned with what others think. But I know I don't have all the answers to living figured out (which for some reason I keep mistaking for a personal flaw rather than part of the human condition), so I try to fill in the gaps of my knowledge by having conversations with other people. This is an effective way to learn, to listen to the wisdom (or folly) of others, but I also need to start listening more to myself. Listening inward is a lot more difficult for me than listening outward, but a few months of therapy got me started trying to pick up my own frequency. And I'm learning now that there are a lot more words than "should" in the language of life. Some of my favorites so far are "enjoy", "patience", and "love".

Inner Self Defense

I'm experiencing a moment of truly happy inner peace. I'm currently rereading the book Eat, Pray, Love, in eager anticipation of the release of the movie version of this fantastic memoir. I first read the book two and a half years ago. I loved the book the first time through, and now I am relishing it even more because of the upcoming movie and also because it resonates with me during this season of my life. The author, Liz, made the difficult decision to divorce her husband when she was around 30 and realized that the life she had been helping to build with him was not what she wanted and was making her miserable. After the divorce was final, she decided to spend a year traveling, first in Italy, then in India, then in Indonesia (Bali), and the book is a recounting of her personal journey (physical, emotional, and spiritual) through those places.

The thing that has struck me as I've read tonight (and I've read almost the entire India section), is the way that she struggled to be patient with herself. I relate a lot to her feelings of inadequacy and failure, as well as to her fear that she will never overcome some of her problems, that her knowledge will always be too limited and her will too difficult to tame. And what's been going through my head is something that she realized along the way that I've also come to realize recently -- that we have to love ourselves enough to be patient with our own learning and growing process. At times, we may have to defend ourselves fiercely against our own discouragement and self-criticism in order to give ourselves the space and the grace we need to seek some inner peace and happiness. We need encouragement and guidance from others, but we also need to be able to listen to ourselves and have some trust and respect for the wise inner voice that can emerge. Reading about another person's journey to heal and to get closer to God and herself is really affirming, and it makes me feel a sort of unity and contentment with everything around me. I can't help feeling like everything (in the world, in my life) is working out for the best, even in spite of the trials we each face and our own imperfections.

What goes up

It's funny how sometimes our experiences can parallel each other's in unexpected ways. For example, recently I've been having a hard time accepting how okay I am given all the major change in my life in the past few months. I find myself thinking, "Am I really fine? Or am I suppressing something that I'm not aware of and it's just going to come crashing down on me at some point?" My good friend Erin has reassured me that it's entirely possible that I am just fine and that things could just be working out as I hope. It's difficult not to be skeptical and just to enjoy this time of growth and happiness, but I think she's right - why not be optimistic?

Meanwhile, Erin has also made a big life change, moving from Chicago to Phoenix and adapting to a new job and social scene. And so far things are going so well that she's now also wondering if she's really going to get off so easily. And so I thought I should remind her of her own wise words, which basically boil down to a nice mantra: "Why not?" Why can't something just go well?

I wish it were easy to live with that sort of optimism. Nobody likes catastrophic surprises, so we try to anticipate and brace ourselves for them, but in doing so at times we hinder our ability to enjoy the good in life right now. It's certain that life still has more bad news and challenges in store for us all, but it also has a lot of joy and blessings to give us, and that's reason to be thankful and have hope.