Things We Have Control Over...and Things We Do Not.

We are back at the gate.  Again.  I don’t know how long it’s been since we first taxied away and looped the runway, and came back again…and I don’t want to know.

Travelling with Paul—it’s easy.  I never worry—about bags, about delays, about extra long security lines.  I know he’s going to be right there to help lift my bag on to the conveyor belt, or hold my jacket while I run to the bathroom, or tease me about my lousy attitude if I haven’t had my coffee/water/wine (depending on the time of day).  I have come to rely on this.  I have come to take this as a given.  So now, when I have to brave the airport alone, I feel unprepared at best…and like a sniveling grump-o, at worst.

And this afternoon, when I left our Brooklyn apartment to come home to our LA apartment (don’t ask), the weight of my over-packed carry-on was like a premonition in my hand.  I did a quick mental calculation of subway steps and train transfers, and walked out into the whipping cold—all by my lonesome.

It’s ridiculous, folks, for me to feel this way.  The number of years I spent navigating all the ups and downs and transfers of my life solo—there is no reason I should feel so besotted with loneliness at the thought of, gasp, carrying my own bag AND purse AND jacket.  The. Whole. Way. Alooooooooone.

Alright, so…I lug my bag down the appropriate number of train steps,  I brave a subway transfer or two, I wait diligently for the appropriate “A” Train to come by, the one that goes to Howard Beach/JFK, and not the one that goes to all the other millions of places the “A” Train goes.  I am assured by a very grumpy woman who is also carrying a suitcase (I wrongly assumed she was also airport-bound) that the train will say on the side that it’s going to JFK.  This does not turn out to be the case.  (And when grumpy-suitcase-woman snuck on to an unmarked C-train without a word…I became deeply suspicious.) However, sneaky suitcase woman or not, I ended up on the right train, somehow…though the whole adventure takes me a lot longer than it should.  And this is it—the beginning of things taking longer than they should.

The train, the other train, the harried trip to the self-check-in kiosks…all of it took longer than it should.  And at the airport, as I’m shoving my scarf into my jacket and fretting about whether my carry-on is going to fit properly into the overhead bins when I get there or whether, like it happened on the way there, some nice old man was going to have to help me jam it into one of the compartments while a dozen aggravated travelers wait behind me…the strap of my purse breaks off my arm.  (This early death may, and I emphasize may, have been hurried along by my trying to jam my laptop into a purse that a laptop for certain does not belong in.)  Regardless of the cause, it breaks…and the guilty laptop and several other things go spilling out onto the floor.

“Oh, your purse broke!” Calls out a woman from across the way who is trying to be helpful.  People are always trying to be helpful like this when you’re in New York. 

Yes, thank you, I said.  I noticed.

As I knelt down, repacking my now-disabled purse, I kept hearing my friend Saskia’s voice chanting in my ear, saying, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”  It’s something that her father used to say to her when she was young, and it stuck for me, just as it must have for her.  I love it.  The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Now barely able to keep my personals in check, I go hurrying (yes, I know) down the million mile airport hallways to the security check point where, for some reason, only three of the many security lines are open and traveler traffic is at a standstill.  I look at my watch.  My plane will begin boarding in fifteen minutes.  I can feel my face starting to get flush.

There are very few things that upset me more than being late.  It is a pathological upset for me.  That, and food getting cold before I am able to eat it.  These are two turns of fate that make me feel like I am losing my grip on the handlebars of my life.  Being late makes me crazy.  I used to have serious meltdowns about it.  I have gotten past that, now that 1. I am an adult and can’t really justify having meltdowns about totally meaningless things and 2. I have been late enough times in my life that I now know the world won’t end.  However, the fact of my aloneness and my giant carry-on bag and my broken purse and the idea that I could miss my plane through no fault of my own, was all conspiring to elevate my temperature and heart-rate and internal rage-o-meter.

And as I stood in line, shuffling from one foot to the other, sighing and rubbing my forehead and aggressively planting my bag in front of some chick who kept trying to cut in front of me, I thought back to the yoga class I had taken the day before. 

There is a new (ish) studio in my beloved DUMBO neighborhood that I am trying to pop into when we’re in town, and I was lucky enough to get into a class yesterday with a teacher I knew from Laughing Lotus, back in the day.  She’s lovely and either Australian or South African—(she is cool-accented, wherever she’s from) and wild-of-hair (like me) and grounded.  She’s one of these teachers who has studied yoga with all kinds of people in all kinds of styles, and you can feel it in her teaching—it’s round and robust.  Full.

Anyhow, for all her gifts in the yogic arts, she started class wrestling with the stereo.  The studio’s stereo system is apparently finicky, and so for the first several minutes of class all we could see was her prone body and the back of her curly head as she coaxed the volume on the ancient set up and down and up and down.  And as she fiddled and groaned about the volume (which refused to budge), she told us how she’d been reading an article earlier that day about all of the things in our lives we think we have control over but actually don’t.  “Electronics,” she said, twirling the volume up and down, “elevator buttons…we think that somehow pushing that button over and over again is actually doing something…but it’s not.  It really has no effect on it, at all.” 

And I thought about this, as I stood in the security line, trying not to scream.

What, honestly, was there to be done?  All the griping and forehead wiping in the world wasn’t going to make things go any faster than they were going.  My angry face was not going to stop me from missing my plane, if that’s what was going to happen.  The fact that I, good student that I am, already had my laptop and liquids and shoes ready to go when I was still fifty feet from the conveyor belt was not, as much as I might want it to, going to change anything about the behavior of anyone else in line in front of me.  I was stuck.  That elevator was going to come when it was going to come, no matter how many times I pushed that goddamn button.

(And let me just tell you…it was a lot.)

And for what felt like the dozenth time in as many days, I thought about how much easier things can be, what a relief they can be, when you can just get comfortable with where you are.  Even (god forbid) if it’s not where you want to be. 

The universe does not owe me an on-time flight.  It certainly is not so deeply indebted to me that I am allowed to act like an a-hole, just because I am in a hurry.  No amount of mental gymnastics are going to change the reality of slow trains, slow lines, and broken bags.  So, why does it feel like it might?  What is it, what little crossed wire in the brain makes it seem like if we just get upset enough, if we just grouse enough or pout enough or rail enough against…that things might actually rearrange themselves in front of us, and more to our liking?

It’s never happened that way for me.  What happens for me is that I get myself worked up into enough of a lather, enough things break or malfunction or trip me up (literally), that I eventually have no choice but to surrender to the reality of the situation.  This elevator is not f-ing coming, and so I had either better take the stairs or find something interesting to read while I wait, because I am going to be here for a while.  And when that happens, when I’m able to snap my little internal control freak in half, then things open up.  Suddenly the line doesn’t move so slowly, the machine-operators don’t seem so incompetent, and before I know it, I’m sitting on my plane.  Happily engrossed by the in-flight magazine…waiting to take off.

Speaking Sanely...

So, I have to admit, I listened to this interview with Mormon author Joanna Brooks because I wanted the dirt!  I wanted the juicy insider-info about the Mormon church!  I wanted the gossip-monger satisfaction of secrets revealed!  I wanted to dish about weird underwear and weirder customs!

But that is not what I got...

Joanna Brooks is, according to her website, an "award winning writer and scholar of religion and spirituality"...and also, a Mormon.  She is a Mormon who grew up in a conservative Mormon household, but as an adult sort of accidentally turned into a feminist.  And then not-so-accidentally married a Jewish man.  Whoops!  She is a Mormon who struggled and volleyed with her faith, but who ended up making a decision that so many people, on so many spiritual paths, have made before her--which is to not abandon the religion to which she was born, even though at moments, it might have felt like she should.  And, because of this, she is a Mormon who has found a way to expand enough to hold all the nuances and contradictions within a faith that she obviously loves very deeply.  And I will tell you, Joanna Brooks may be a Mormon, but as far as I'm concerned...this chick is a yogi.

I loved her so much, I wrote her a fan letter (email) immediately upon the conclusion of the interview.  She and Ira Glass are now the only two people I have written fan letters to.  (As an adult.)

(And for those of you who know my deep love for/borderline obsession with Ira Glass...that is saying something.)

 Joanna Brooks wrote me back.  Ira Glass did not.  Point, Joanna.

Okay, so full disclosure--I don't know a lot about Mormonism.  I had a good friend when I was growing up who was Mormon, but we were young, and all I knew was that her family had a big store room full of food and supplies (the encouraged "years worth of food"), and that she, my friend, was constantly in pre-teen agony about the boy she loved not being a Mormon.  When I was graduating from high school, years after she and I had grown apart, I got an announcement for her wedding.  Not, of course, to the not-Mormon boy she was in love with.  To some other boy, someone I'd never met.  At only 16 myself, and just beginning to discover the world, I remember feeling so...disappointed.  How could she get married?  She wasn't much older than me, maybe two years at most, and at the time I thought, well, that's it for her.  She's done.  She would get married and then there would be babies and babies and more babies, and that would be it.

So this, until today, was my basic understanding of Mormonism--it was strict, you couldn't marry who you wanted, and if you were a woman, your job--your life--was going to be about having babies and being a wife.

And then there's the, ahem, politics of the Mormon Church, which are unquestionably ultra-conservative slash deeply disturbing.   And though it's not really integral to this post, I do feel like it's important to mention that I do not agree with the stance of the Mormon Church on gay rights or women's rights--or on social issues in general, it's probably safe to say--and no interview, no matter how lovely, is going to change that.  Though of course, the same could be said for the Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Church, and for countless others.  I just want that on the record.

But, it's not the Mormon Church that I found so moving, it's not the history and ritual of the Mormon faith--though it was beautifully rendered by Ms. Brooks in her interview--which inspired me to first write to her, and now to write this.  It was, instead, the power of her flexible, and sane way of speaking about her faith, that moved me.

I have realized, since writing this blog these last few years, that if I have any goal in mind...if there's anything that I really WANT from all this writing and interviewing and talking and teaching and practicing, it is to seek out and nurture spiritual sanity.  To figure out how it is that those of us who are on fire with God in some form or another (whether your God is one God or many Gods or whether your God is Art or Breath or Movement or just the sacred stuff of your Life)--how is it that we can bring this God into our lives in a way that is real, and meaningful and leaves room for the very necessary doubt and constant change that is so much a part of our world.  Is there a way to be a person of faith and have a dialogue about it that doesn't include dogma but DOES include divinity?  And love.  And compassion.

And people like Joanna Brooks make me feel like that goal is accomplishable.

Because, without question, she and I are very different.  We have very different backgrounds, and very different conceptions, maybe, of the practicals of God--what that looks like, how it came to be, and how to call it by name--but I would imagine, though I can't speak for her, that our ideas about the essence, the heart, of God...are probably very much the same.  The easy road, of course, is to retreat to opposite corners, to claim lack of understanding and to grudgingly go on our ways.  The difficult thing, and the thing that Joanna Brooks is trying to do, that all of the teachers and speakers I respect most are trying to do, is to stretch the walls of her understanding of God so that it becomes more inclusive.

I was reading something the other day by Thomas Traherne, a "metaphysical poet" (thank you, Wikipedia) from the 17th Century, and he was talking about how we all, as children, are born with a divine knowledge of presence--the world is new to us, and everything is one unfolding mystery.  But, he writes, the real work, the real trick of divinity, is not to somehow go back to before we knew anything, it is, instead, this process of "unlearning" everything that has darkened our view thus far.  This is the more miraculous thing, he says: to travel from corruption back to innocence.

And I couldn't help but think of Joanna Brooks, and how devoted she is to this work, not of abandoning her faith, but of instead, stripping away the layers of corruption, to get back to the sweet center.

Check out the interview, if you have a chance, or Joanna Brooks' blog: Ask Mormon Girl.  And then let me know what you think of her and the work she's doing...yay or nay?

No Butts About It...

We are great fools.  "He has passed his life in idleness," we say.  "I have done nothing today."  What! Haven't you lived?  That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations.  "Had I been put in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown you what I could do."  Have you been able to think out and manage your life? You have performed the greatest work of all.  In order to show and release her powers, Nature has no need of fortune; she shows herself equally on all levels, and behind a curtain as well as without one.  To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct.  Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.  All other things, to rule, to lay up treasure, to build, are at most but little appendices and props. 

- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Need I add anything to that...?!  Maybe just this (written by the same dude):

It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine, for a man to know how to rightfully enjoy his being.  We seek other conditions because we don't understand the use of our own, and go out of ourselves because we don't know what it is like within.  Yet it is no use for us to mount on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk with our own legs.  And upon the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.

What My Head and Drew Barrymore Have In Common...

I have been thinking a lot lately about posture.  Blame seeing too many photos of myself with round-y shoulders, blame an ever-increasing (sometimes aggravating) awareness of how my body is moving through space, blame the simple fact that I'm teaching yoga, so I feel like I probably shouldn't be, um...slouching.  All. The. Time.

Whatever the reason, it's been on my mind.

When I first started noticing my own sometimes suspect shoulder slumping, I asked Paul, (no demanded, actually), if he would please point it out to me if he ever saw my posture go all wonky.  Which he, dutifully, did...but only on a few occasions, because I don't think he could stand the look of abject horror that crossed my face if he happened to remind me at the wrong moment.  Oh, I'm sorry, whaaaaaaaat?!  My posture isn't good enough for you?  Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!

Poor guy.

First, let me just say that my own particular misalignment, turns out, is not an uncommon one.  My shoulders round slightly, my head pokes forward, and the back of my neck compresses.  (Pretty!)  The result is the picture an eager-yet-uncertain student.  Or of a person endlessly reaching for something with the tip of their chin...or...ugh.  It's depressing, just writing about it.

I take some small comfort in the fact that Drew Barrymore and I share the same affliction.

(Oh, Drew...sigh.  Just one of the many things we share in common, I'm sure.  Why can't we be besties?)

So, okay, so I'm interested, obviously in having good posture for all of the body-mechanical benefits.  I want fluidity in my body and efficiency in my muscles, but I'm MUCH more interested (surprise sur-freaking-prise) in the psychological and emotional what-fors behind the whole thing.

Here's what it feels like in my own body:  it feels like some part of me thinks that my head reaching forward is keeping things under control, like that if my head can beat my body--can cross the finish line first--then I'm going to be in control of whatever is in front of me.  My head, in this position, is in front of my heart.  It is, in some ways maybe (and I apologize for the necessary cliche-ness of this next statement) it is protecting my heart.  I mean, of course it's NOT.  But it feels like it might be.  Because I'll tell you what, anytime I remember to lean my head back in a yoga class or, like I did just before sitting down to write this post, I stand against the wall with my butt and shoulders touching it and then press the back of my head into the wall...the vulnerability I feel when I get my head in proper alignment...is marked.

In the yoga philosophy, the front plane of the body represents the individual, the egoic, self, and the back-plane of the body represents the universal, the larger self.  If this is true, then the larger self is something we only have to lean back into, and the little "I" self is always something that's just out in front of us. And while I'm sure you could diagnose a head-reaching-forward posture as something which is simply the result of too much time on the computer or in the car, or talking to people who are taller than you (I made that one up), I'm going to venture out on a limb here and say, maybe...maybe it's something bigger than that.

Maybe Drew Barrymore doesn't feel totally safe resting back into that big unknown.  Maybe Drew is a bit of an overachiever (being famous at age four, or whatever, for being totally adorable...I think that could do it), and maybe the only way she's known how to navigate is by reaching and grasping and "me first" ing.  And maybe this used to be something that helped her survive, but maybe now it's just doing more harm than good.  Maybe her little system would like a break.  Maybe if Drew could just, exhale, and lean her little head back...who knows what might happen.

I'm talking strictly about Drew Barrymore here, obviously, not anyone else.  Just to clear up any confusion.  If any of you thought I might be talking about...someone...else.  I'm not.  I'm really just going to keep my analysis to the postures of celebrities.  Tune in next week when we'll delve into some deep discussion about Jennifer Aniston's lumbar curve.  Wowza!

(Alright, I'm talking about me.)

I have no real solution to this posture dilemma, except that I am trying to remember to sit up straight, and to tell my little head (softly) that maybe she doesn't need to work so hard all the time.  Maybe the world won't end.  Maybe her life won't go slipping out of her grasp if she just...rests back every once in a while.

Now if someone could just send me Drew Barrymore's number...I could tell her, too.

A Man on a Mission...

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.  Don't settle.  As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.  And, like any great relationship, it just get's better and better as the years roll on.  So keep looking until you find it.  Don't settle."

- Steve Jobs

Digging Deep

It's raining.  The rain in Los Angeles is one of my favorite things.  It drives Paul crazy because all of LA is designed for outdoor living, and so on rainy days it's hard not to just feel...left out in it.

I, however, have always been a lover of the rain.  Having been a child who was much happier reading books or playing pretend in the confines of my own room than going, ugh, outside...the rain was the perfect wash-away-er of any playtime guilt.  No need to make excuses for not stomping around in the woods...it's raining!  Also, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, the majority of my childhood memories are under-written by a soundtrack of rain--rain on the nylon tent roof, rain being whisked away by the shoosh of windshield wipers, rain filling the gutters and splashing down the sides of the house.  The smell of rain, the feel of it, the patter as it hits the sidewalk below the window...it is a tool for load-lightening.  So, today I am happily ensconced inside, letting the rain sooth my tired brain.

Yesterday I went to class for the first time in several days.

My practice lately is hard-won.  I came back from the wedding with a lot of questions about my life at large, and for the first time, my heretofore-blissly-uncomplicated relationship with yoga has become, well...complicated.  In a class I taught on Monday I talked about how important dedication is, and how it's easy to devote yourself to something when it brings you nothing but pleasure, but the challenge is to devote yourself to something even when you don't want to.  Like for me, lately, going to class.  One of my favorite teachers at Still Yoga, Gina Zimmerman, likes to quote this saying:

"If you want to strike water, don't dig twenty wells ten feet deep.  Dig one well two-hundred feet deep."

In private Gina has told me that her meditation practice used to be a catch-all of methods.  One day she'd try one technique and the next day another.  When she found her teacher, she told me, one of the first things he said to her is that the worst thing you can do, when sitting down to meditate, is think, "what should I try this time?" His point being that dabbling, when it comes to a spiritual practice, isn't going to lead you very far.  You have to dig one well, and dig it deeply.

The trouble, I find, is that usually for the first, oh, fifty-feet of well-digging, things go along swimmingly.  It's all sand and grass and silt, and you feel like progress is yours for the having.  Until, eventually, you hit rock.  And you're just banging your shovel against it in a spray of sparks, feeling, for the first time maybe, the impossibility of the endeavor.

This is the moment you either tell yourself that you're probably digging in the wrong place and that you ought to pick up and move elsewhere.  Or you continue.  With only the faith that there IS water down there, and with your aching arms as the only proof of forward movement.

There was an article in this week's New York Times magazine about these two schools in Manhattan, one a fancy-pants private school in the Bronx, and one a charter school for lower income students, both run by progressive headmasters, both of whom are deeply engaged in a mission to change the way that studentship is measured.  For years both of these men have been studying trends in learning and psychology in order to develop a practical way to both measure and develop character in their students.

Their reason for doing this?

At both the fancy-pants school and the charter school a disturbing trend was emerging.  Those students who had done the best, academically, were exhibiting the largest failure rate in college and beyond.  At the private school it became clear that the students of privilege were so accustomed to sailing through their life that they crumpled at the first instance of push-back, post-adolescence.  And for the kids at the charter school, the students who had learned how to get the grades, had not learned how to have optimism about their future.  No one else in their family had managed to do it, so why should they?

The problem for both sets of students was the same...they had not learned how to fail, and they had not learned, in particular, that after failure must come re-commitment.

Grit, both of these headmasters soon discovered, along with qualities like optimism, curiosity and zest for life, were the real factors that contribute to success.  Not GPA or even IQ scores.

Grit.  The trait that allows one to set a goal and follow-through, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how many obstacles show up along the way.

Grit.  To keep on digging, even when it feels like you're going nowhere.

The Bhagavad Gita, one of the great (and aggravating) texts of yoga, is full of recommendations for enhancing grit:

"It is true that the mind is restless and difficult to control.  But it can be conquered...through regular practice and detachment.  Those who lack self-control will find it difficult to progress in meditation; but those who are self-controlled, striving earnestly through the right means, will attain the goal... 

Through constant effort over many lifetimes, a person becomes purified of all selfish desires and attains the supreme goal of life."

Phew!  Talk about taking the long view..."constant effort over many lifetimes"?!  That is one deep f-ing well.  But the point is well-made.  Keep on keeping on.  In meditation, in particular, the idea that we could learn to control our mind--our mind which we have been letting run wild, most of us, for as long as we've been alive--the idea that we could achieve this without real discipline and dedication is just...foolish.

And so it goes for anything that we want.  To change our habits.  To make a contribution to the world.  Just to achieve the very simple trophy of saying we are going to do something and then actually DOING it...these things take devotion.

For myself, I am going to class.  Even if I'm not sure I want to.  I am writing.  Even if I'm not sure I have anything to say.  I'm finishing the articles I have started reading, I'm making recipes into food, I'm studying and progressing and completing, even in those moments when I don't know why I'm bothering and what it's all for.  And though for the most part I'm having to just put up with the little voice in my head that says we should just shove off and find another place to dig, there are moments, like yesterday when I was in class, where all of the sudden the sky turns a dusky pink and the sidewalk becomes a sudden matrix of raindrops, when I feel like maybe all I need to do is just...keep...digging.

Say No to the Normals!

It has been hard to come back.

Even though one of my friends teased me today that I was just suffering the post-wedding let-down of "not getting to be a princess anymore", I would say that's only part of it.  And for the record, I wasn't really so much a princess as I was, an...I don't know...an 1800's-era sepia-toned photograph?  Of a cowgirl.  Getting married.  To a prince.

Heh heh.

So, maybe it's a little bit that.

I will save you the gory details of all this and just say, when one (me), does something momentous in one's life (maaaaaaarried), it tends to get the ol' wheels a spinning regarding what one's purpose is and how far down the path to exceptional-ness one is.

And there, of course, lies the rub.

Because that pesky search for the exceptional is, for this writer, just a one-way ticket to despair.  And I can not believe that I'm alone in this.  Aren't we all suffering just a little bit from the sting of constant failure in the face of one-million-and-one messages of, "you are special and can have whatever you want" that are being beamed at us on a daily basis, not just in our various careers and endeavors, but also in our advertising, in the anxiety-death-trap of Facebook and even in (gulp) our yoga practices?  Am I the only one who feels that having to acknowledge, over and over again, that I am neither Oprah nor Angelina Jolie nor Eckhart Tolle, is downright galling, and proof-positive of my having failed in the world at large?

Anyone?

I was listening to an interview with Carolyn Myss the other day (who I find completely terrifying and mesmerizing...terrifying because she gets so yell-y about lazy spiritualism, and mesmerizing because she's the angriest mystic I've ever encountered, and that's just hard not to love), and she was talking about how so many (lazy!) people are running around feeling terrified of being ordinary, and because of that, are just filling their lives with distraction.  Anything they can use to prove to themselves, and everyone else, that they are not (god forbid)...one of the normals.

(quick tangent: one day, when Paul and I were looking for wedding venues, we got a tour of this resort place in Big Bear, and the woman taking us on the tour kept talking about how celebrities come and stay there sometimes and how you'd never know they were celebrities, "because they look just like normals".  As if these were the only two categories of human:  Celebrities...and Normals.)

And this, Shanti-towners, this quest to not be one of the Normals...is a totally destructive one.  And I know, because I am very, very, very familiar with it. Very.  Veeeeeeeeeeery.

The desire to be exceptional driven by the fear of ordinary-ness, is not just really, really painful, it is also totally and completely unproductive.

Because, in order to measure one's life against the ordinary/exceptional-o-meter, one has to step out of one's life.  You can't measure that which you're, you know, actively participating in.  So, everything has to come to a halt while you jump OUT of your life, drag out your various methods of calculation and evaluation, and then, once you've proven (once again) that you are NOT in fact a gorgeous genius in the way you thought you were/were told you should be/promised you would be, then you have to spend some time...weeping.  Or breaking things.  (Whichever way you're wired).  And then?

Well then you need to make a PLAN.

You need to make the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better.  But, oh! Shoot!  Before you even MAKE the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better, you have to make sure that you've sussed out all the possible options of arenas in which this plan will take place.  This is going to take some real serious fantasizing and pointless internet-searching.  After all, you don't want to commit to the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better and have it be the wrong plan now, do you?  That would be really bad.  That would mean that you might never actually be exceptional.  No, no, you have to paste together all the appropriate clues and signs and hunches into exactly the right formula or else, who knows, you might not end up taking the right exit.  And then your exceptionalness will just be waiting there for you, stranded...and she's a fickle one, that exceptional-ity, and she might just take off with someone else.  Some hapless traveler who took YOUR goddamn exit.

No, you must think carefully.  Best not act too quickly.

And so there you sit, wondering if it's this path or this one or that one, and how it might look, and how great it's going to be, and how all the struggles of your life have probably just led you here, how this moment, picking your toes on your couch is probably your watershed moment, and when they make the biopic about your life, this is going to be the surprising turn-around moment, the one where all your family and friends are like, "we always knew she'd do something big, and finally she did"....  But you wonder why, then, you feel so stuck.  And you wonder why everyone else seems to be...getting things done.

But then you make yourself feel better, because you realize that those poor sods, those folks out there in the world actually making movies and writing books and designing footwear...those folks probably haven't done this important work you're doing.  Those folks probably aren't destined for greatness, so it's much easier for them, to waste their time...accomplishing things.  Let them have their toys of productivity!  Let them be engaged in the day to day process of living!  Fodder for the Normals!  You are better than that.  You are heading towards greatness!

How do you knooooooow?  Well, you're...

thinking about it...

a lot, and um...

it's really a high priority...

eventually, so...

uh.

(Am I making my point?)

What I come back to, again and again, in my own uncomfortable quest for...something.  For purpose, I guess.  For engagement.  Is that the art of living requires a kind of real surrender.  Not surrender to some greater "god" force (though that's part of it), but surrender just to the daily back-and-forth act of living.  Surrendering to your actual life. The surrendering up of the part of you that wants to evaluate and control. Surrendering so that what is in front of you, is enough.  Surrendering so that you can DO things without constantly evaluating the worth of those things based on what they might GET you.

So, maybe all of that energy, all of that time we're taking to figure out how we can and what we need to do in order to make our lives BETTER.  Finally fixed.  Finally perfect.  Maybe we should instead be using all of that energy to live the life we currently have.  Imagine what we could do.  Imagine the kind of awesome shit you could do, if you weren't trying to change anything...if you were just trying to glorify what currently IS?

Because THAT, I'm coming to believe, that day-to-day communion with our own lives, no matter what they look like...that is just about as exceptional as we can get.