Last summer I was driving home from a hair appointment, listening to a podcast.  It was a truly beautiful day and a beautiful ride, as I used to drive all the way to my old hometown for my hair and the roads between here and there are fairly beautiful ~ winding through green, lush countryside.

The podcast was Goop (obviously).  I am a big fan of Elise Loehnan’s guests and the conversations and she was speaking with a Swami … something-or-other.  I apologize for my ignorance but I can’t seem to find the information anywhere.  What I know is that what he said has stayed with me since, drifting in and out of my conscious mind.  Lingering in the shadows of my emotions, my reactions, my life choices.  Quarantine and COVID were incredibly challenging (and continue to be so) and something that this wise man said in his conversation with Elise (I believe at one of the In Goop Health summits) has grounded me when I’ve felt like I was on the edge of a cliff.

It was about the idea of attachment.  And that our human unhappiness and dissatisfaction is always linked back to attachment.  Attachment to things, yes, but also to ideas, philosophies, traditions, the ‘way things have always been.’

It hurts and is uncomfortable to grow.  To expand.  As humans we cling to familiarity, but also with known quantities.  We describe most things in terms of other things … such as, my MS is like feeling really really tired, times ten million, all the time.  I am using the notion of fatigue as the basis for my description.  Assuming that everyone has a rudimentary understanding of being tired.  But what if that was taken away from me?  How would I describe it then?

In this year of global reckoning and (hopefully) growth, I believe humanity has routinely found itself uncomfortable.  Clinging to the known quantities.  Unwilling to expand and try a new perspective, or a new level of understanding because too much was changing, there were too many moving parts.  We (the collective we) chose to cling to ideas of safety, of ‘the good ole days’ because that nostalgia gave us peace, comfort.  Instead of acknowledging that our comfort in those times perpetuated other’s discomfort.  Yes, that acknowledgement hurts.  And it’s hard.

We are attached to ideas.  We are attached to memories, or things that we have put our faith in, built our personality on; the building blocks of who we believe we are.

I am attached to the idea of equality.  But does my definition of equality include everyone?  If I do a self-examination of (white) women’s quest for female empowerment, am I willing to concede that it did so on the backs of BIPOC and didn’t fight for the equality of all women, but merely white women?

I am attached to a notion of family, but does my family reflect that?  Have I based my ideas on reality and am I holding people to standards that are unfair?  Am I judging others on qualities that only exist in my own idea of family, rather than the reality of what my family actually is?  Flawed, human, different than me  …. How can I hold others accountable for unspoken expectations?  For wishes and dreams?  How can I be angry or disappointed if they don’t live up to what I’ve built in my mind?  … I can’t.

My mother used to say “It’s all just stuff.”  It’s simple and direct and can be interpreted a million ways.  But I think of it like this ~ what we choose to carry with us, to define ourselves, to create our foundation … it’s all just stuff.  The ideas, the belief system, the popasahn chair.  It’s stuff.  And we can be as attached as we want to be.  We can cling to things, we can be immoveable.  Or we can be fluid, we can be open to change.  I vacillate between the extremes, trying to force myself to be as open-minded and thoughtful as possible.

I don’t always succeed.  But I’ll keep on trying.

xox, g

This morning, as I watered my meager garden, the breeze rustled the leaves and it was cool.  Refreshing.

Yesterday was brutal.  And my (occasionally reliable) weather app tells me there is more of that to come tomorrow.  Today is the respite.

This year has been … intense.  It’s hard to wrap my brain around the fact that I began it in Tokyo with my brother, my cousins, my husband.  Waking up on a mattress on the floor, shivering in the cold.  Now, I’ve been home — uninterrupted — for nearly eight months.  I have grown a garden, I have made pasta and bread.  I began working for the first time in over three years.  Husband and I survived unemployment, battles with health insurance, tricky diseases and family.  We lost his brother.  We gained knowledge and understanding of our world and our country that we had never known before.  We have been uncomfortable, unsure.  Angry.  Sad.  Disappointed.  Afraid.

I’ve spent time this year contemplating the idea of perspective and truth.  How we each come to where we currently are — what we currently believe.  How people I love, have loved, can say and believe the things they do.  How I reconcile that within myself.  How I’ve often – of late- been willing to walk away.

My experiences, my education — my life thus far has shaped how I feel I fit into the world.  There are things I cannot change.  There are things I can and I must.  I must be willing to be supremely uncomfortable, and I must be wise enough to be quiet.  Those things are difficult.  Sometimes, nearly impossible.  I was raised to have and to use my voice.  Deferring to others is a challenge.  But sometimes — and this is so important —  it is the right thing to do.

I have been forever changed this year.  Like all years.  Just more starkly, more abruptly.  There is nothing subtle about 2020.  There is no “going back.”  And for anyone who longs for that, who wishes to return to a “simpler” time — a time before COVID-19, a time before the most recent civil rights movement — you are part of what holds us all back.

We cannot go back.  Not to a time when women had no rights, no voice.  Not to a time before COVID changed our very existence: how we live, how we travel, how we function in the world.  Not to a time when white dominated and erased and marginalized all other colors.  Time does not go back.  To strive to rewind diminishes all that people have worked for toward equality, toward humanity, toward making America’s ideals a reality for all Americans.

I listen to news reports of the RNC and I wonder how people believe him, how my fellow Americans support his lies, his manipulation, his slow movement toward dictatorship and erasure of all humans who do not agree with him.  I can’t make sense of it other than these people, their lives and their education and their values somehow align with him.  And while I cannot understand it, I must acknowledge that we are not all equal, and we do not all believe and put value into the same things.  And while that feels very frightening right now, it is also what makes this America.

It’s July and we are still in the throes of Covid.  In addition to a great, much-needed civil rights movement.  As a white woman, I am doing my best to not f*ck up.  That’s the honest to goodness truth.  It’s a minefield and there are so many things I did not learn.  We — collectively, as a country — did not learn.

When everything reached a fever pitch in early June, I felt overwhelmed.  So much information, so much coming-to-terms with my own damaging behaviour.  So much hate toward white women.  It was — and continues to be — a lot.  I’ve always said about myself that I exist on the ends of the spectrum, I see things in black and white.  And what I keep learning over and over is that life and existence only exists in the in-between.  Not even the primary colors like red, yellow and blue.  But in every shade, every variation.  Truth exists like that — my truth, your truth, the world’s truth, the historian’s truth.  Everything told and played through perspective, different angles and glass tones and lighting.

I spent some time in my youth studying light design for theatre.  (I loved it).  There is a world of difference between a human standing on an empty stage in stark white light versus the same person, standing on the same stage, in any other combination of light, intensity and gel color.  It doesn’t look the same.

This, I believe, is true of the human experience.  We are all looking through filters, we are informed by our own experiences, the things we’ve been taught, the things we’ve seen.  Some of us can try to step outside ourselves and critically look at how we behave, how things have influenced us — but many of us never do that.  We are caught in the emotions, the anger, the hurt.  We have created our experience and there is nothing outside of that.  it is all-consuming.

In my brief study of yoga, we discussed the idea of our minds creating our entire reality.  Aka, what blue means to me, how I see blue, versus anyone else. How I smell orange, describe cold, consider air.  Our minds create this world that we live in, but it isn’t the stripped down truth of reality.  Our minds organize things and allow us to have an enjoyable life experience, rather than being caught in a caucophany of infinite assaults on our senses.  It molds our reality to our likes and dislikes; what we are struck by, intrigued by, turned off by.  How wild is that?

~*~

It is very hard to accept the new terms being asked of us — that we have unknowingly committed harm over years, decades, centuries.  That all of the accomplishments of great men are tarnished by loathesome behaviour that was commonly accepted.  It is hard to keep trying even when you are told every day you are wrong, that the rules have changed again.  It is asking a lot of humanity to do that.  To accept that the reality and the history of the world cannot be determined solely by who wrote it and it cannot be defended solely by who speaks loudest.  There are subtleties and information that is uncomfortable and downright shameful.  That is f*cking hard.  I have watched people I love and respect say and do things that have horrified me in defense of the history they have accepted and perpetuated for themselves and for humanity.

We are living through unprecendented times.  We are being told that while we might be capable of nearly anything, we have to stay home and wear a mask because an invisible virus could be lurking.  We are being challenged to question the status quo of history, of mankind.  It is not easy.  It is hard, hard work.  It is exhausting (especially when you’re handicapped already as I am).

But we need to do it anyway.  Because we decide to.

xo, g