EBB AND FLOW

"The life of the spirit," said Saint-Exupery, "the veritable life, is intermittent and only the life of the mind is constant...The spirit...alternates between total vision and absolute blindness. Here is a man, for example, who loves his farm---but there are moments when he sees in it only a collection of unrelated objects. Here is a man who loves his wife---but there are moments when he sees in love nothing but burdens, hindrances, contraints. Here is a man who loves music---but there are moments when it cannot reach him."

The "veritable life" of our emotions and our relationships also is intermittent. When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretent to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror in its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity---in freedom.....

Intermittency---an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?..........................Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea


Last week I caught up with a friend who I'd been trying to meet up with for a while. I needed to give her some papers to review and she told me it'd be fine to leave them in her mailbox. Life and Circumstances being what they are, I got caught up and didn't get to her mailbox at the time I thought I would. When I did get there I saw her car in the driveway. I knocked on the door and we talked a while. She shared with me that she'd just come back from a meeting at her daughter's school. Frustration veiled her face as we discussed the problems her daughter is having in school. We discussed, as we see it, the problems that exist in the public schools today that directly relate to this No Child Left Behind legislation (but that's for another post). As we were talking her husband made his way up the drive. Back bent, face folded into a frown, eyebrows furrowed he looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. It was unseasonably hot last week and when I asked him "Why you frownin' so?" his wife agreed and said, "Yea, why are you frownin' like that? Is it the heat?" Yea, he said. It's the heat. We both (she and I) knew what he meant. The heat of being a parent. The heat of balancing all this stuff in Life at one time. The heat of the very fact that just when things feel like they're going okay, some fist out of the Great Nowhere, punches you in the gut to wake you up to Reality, knocking the wind clean out of your chest, leaving you by the side of the road wondering what the heck just happened.

I felt for my friend. Then later, when I came home, I read a couple of blogs around town and realized that other people I know are "going through" too. Wrestling with odd emotions; feeling overwhelmed. And then, this past weekend, I got to feeling that hum-drum feeling. That feeling that Goapele mentions in her first track "Sometimes I feel like I'm never gonna get past here." Got to feeling like all the things I want are far out of reach. Got to feeling like it's going to be one very....long....life. Potty training. Sit still. Stand up. Come over here. Sit down. Behave. Stop talking back. Put your shoes on. Where's your coat? Didn't I tell you to sit down? Post office. Grocery store. Laundry. Vacuuming. Dusting. Folding clothes. Stop talking back, I said. Stand up. Sit down. Boil the water for oatmeal. Check homework. Sign homework. Start answering the inevitable question: whose house are we going to for Thanksgiving? And the most difficult for me: how am I going to make it through the next two months of insane consumer spending, the commercialization of what is supposed to be the holiest day of the American year. Why can I not just get on the first thing smoking out of here to St. Bart's?? Just that trapped, hum-drum, yucky-thoughts feeling.

But the thing I told my friend was this: that this, with her daughter----the frustration, confusion, the weariness of it all is the Ebb and Flow of Life. Nothing is ever the same; no moment is ever like the preceding moment. This is the nature of what we call Being Alive. Shit happens. I think the frustration comes from our own expectation that everything is supposed to be Okay all the time. Not only is that not possible but it's a horribly misguided notion that we are socialized to believe. I think the other thing is that, as the Buddhists teach, we have to learn to find comfort in the fact that our emotions and the way we process the events in our lives is constantly shifting too. We have to learn to be as comfortable in the "up" moments as we are in the "down," realizing that each emotion we have is not only valid but fleeting. The trick is in not getting stuck in whatever emotion you find yourself.

When I was younger I had a horrible way of blowing things out of proportion. A bad day could easily turn into a bad week. But one of the things I'm learning, perhaps through meditation, is to let the feelings that I have be as they are for the length of time they need to be. And when it's time to let it go, let it go. I'm learning that life is nothing if it's not change, intermittency. That what is here today, is gone tomorrow. By no means have I mastered control of my emotions -- and I'm not even sure it's something I want to do anyhow -- but I am learning that there is an Ebb and Flow to life and that to expect things to stay the same is an exercise in futility. I'm learning that all we can do is all we can do. That everything has a way of working itself out. The pain of a lover who leaves, a child who struggles, a goal unmet: somehow, Life, in her mystical way, always works things out.

I guess it boils down to Trust. Trust in Life, trust in the nature of life. Trust in ourselves that whatever we're feeling is fleeting and that no matter how painful it is, somehow we will make it through.

Be Good,
A.