A Happy Mess
I skipped a gathering after my class tonight and instead came home—or rather back to the home that I refrain from calling home. My temporary abode. As I circled the block twice, looking for an easy-in, easy-out parking space, I didn’t feel any regret that I couldn’t find two open spaces—nor any deficiency that I was too tired, too wired to attempt what would be (I assume) for most an easy parallel park. Parallel parking has never been easy for me, and I accept it. But all day, and for a week prior to today, I intended to join my classmates and my professor. I was looking forward to it, even after a very long (and enjoyable) weekend of travel with my daughter and a friend. We road-tripped to Dayton, OH to meet, for the first time, someone I got to know “out here” – an internet friend and musician who, with his wife, a vocalist & percussionist and young bass-player friend, performs at the BRD House, a place too cool for me to do justice to it if I tried describing it in my fatigued state.
I’ve spent a lot of time today in awe that my body did not resist more rigorously the fourteen hours of driving, the four hours of sitting Saturday evening, and the additional get-up-and-go this morning (which included another two hours of driving) to get back to the city. I allowed myself to be fully aware of my body, what it was doing, how it was feeling. I couldn’t get to my apartment this morning to grab the bag of tortilla chips I bought last week. Bucket trucks blocked both lanes of traffic, and I don’t know the neighborhood well enough to scoot around the side streets efficiently; I had a meeting at twelve-thirty, and I didn’t want to be late, so I turned back, and after I got to campus, I walked the half a block to the 7-11 to buy another bag.
There and back, I practiced mindfulness: I am walking, I am walking. My right foot comes up, my cane with it. My right foot comes down, my cane with it. Now my left foot, up, down. I see the grass growing in the lawn of the William Pitt Union. The dandelions have grown tall, gone to seed. The seed has been blown away. They are in the beds of hosta, too. Purple petunias sprinkled throughout. The tulips are fading. The rain has begun again, just sprinkles. I left my umbrella in the car, and my hair has already begun to mat over my eyes. It needs to be cut.
Where is the pain? In my hands: the left, gripping my cane. The right, holding the grocery bag with the tortilla chips and a bottle of water. The water is half-empty already. I opened it and gulped as the cashier rang it up. I’m thirsty again, dehydrated-thirsty.
The pain is in my knees, acute as each foot touches the pavement, and then takes my weight. The pain is in my feet. I can feel each individual bone, especially those in the right. I can feel the inside bones of my ankles poking out. The right is not a bone at all, but it feels like real bone. I think about it. A steel shoe horn, hugged around my tibia. Now I feel the steel and each of the seven screws anchoring it to the bone underneath.
The pain is in my shoulders. My purse strap, slung across my body diagonally, cuts into the meat of my right shoulder. No pressure on the left—my messenger bag is in the car. But the pain is there, as if it were.
The pain is in my lower back, and I suck my gut in, tuck my tailbone. Keep walking.
I have so much “I,” where is the “Not-I?”
All day, all day yesterday, all day the day before I felt, acknowledged and acted, not in spite of, but with the pain. To resist is to say the pain is something
foreign, something I have to deny in order to function. Delusion.
And when Helen said to me tonight, “You look exhausted,” I realized that following through on the plans I had made this evening was more an assertion of the “I” than accepting that this body I’d been observing so closely had finally run out of steam. So I didn’t feel disappointment that I couldn’t find a parking spot I so self-consciously knew I couldn’t slide into, at least not then. But I did realize some regret that all the imagined conversations would not take place, that the good wishes to the soon-to-graduate would not be made, at least not in festive surroundings—although I’ve rarely imagined and found reality to be even close to those imaginings. “All I’d imagined” is usually a wish more than a truth. Saturday evening and the music my friends played wasn’t (it was better), though in honesty, meeting my friends for the first time, face-to-face, was exactly as I imagined, and that’s more rare, finding no slippage between the virtual and the real.
The regret of earlier has since faded away. I can email Renee and ask her about the challenges of being Evangelical Christian and tolerant of difference at the same time. Did I really need to engage Jason in a conversation about Warren Zevon, likely to prove my superiority in knowledge of the man and his music? And I did want to talk with Joel, ask where he grew up, tell him I’m very self-aware and know I’m often a mess, though a happy mess. Yes, a happy mess. I think I like that.
Till later…
I’ve spent a lot of time today in awe that my body did not resist more rigorously the fourteen hours of driving, the four hours of sitting Saturday evening, and the additional get-up-and-go this morning (which included another two hours of driving) to get back to the city. I allowed myself to be fully aware of my body, what it was doing, how it was feeling. I couldn’t get to my apartment this morning to grab the bag of tortilla chips I bought last week. Bucket trucks blocked both lanes of traffic, and I don’t know the neighborhood well enough to scoot around the side streets efficiently; I had a meeting at twelve-thirty, and I didn’t want to be late, so I turned back, and after I got to campus, I walked the half a block to the 7-11 to buy another bag.
There and back, I practiced mindfulness: I am walking, I am walking. My right foot comes up, my cane with it. My right foot comes down, my cane with it. Now my left foot, up, down. I see the grass growing in the lawn of the William Pitt Union. The dandelions have grown tall, gone to seed. The seed has been blown away. They are in the beds of hosta, too. Purple petunias sprinkled throughout. The tulips are fading. The rain has begun again, just sprinkles. I left my umbrella in the car, and my hair has already begun to mat over my eyes. It needs to be cut.
Where is the pain? In my hands: the left, gripping my cane. The right, holding the grocery bag with the tortilla chips and a bottle of water. The water is half-empty already. I opened it and gulped as the cashier rang it up. I’m thirsty again, dehydrated-thirsty.
The pain is in my knees, acute as each foot touches the pavement, and then takes my weight. The pain is in my feet. I can feel each individual bone, especially those in the right. I can feel the inside bones of my ankles poking out. The right is not a bone at all, but it feels like real bone. I think about it. A steel shoe horn, hugged around my tibia. Now I feel the steel and each of the seven screws anchoring it to the bone underneath.
The pain is in my shoulders. My purse strap, slung across my body diagonally, cuts into the meat of my right shoulder. No pressure on the left—my messenger bag is in the car. But the pain is there, as if it were.
The pain is in my lower back, and I suck my gut in, tuck my tailbone. Keep walking.
I have so much “I,” where is the “Not-I?”
All day, all day yesterday, all day the day before I felt, acknowledged and acted, not in spite of, but with the pain. To resist is to say the pain is something
foreign, something I have to deny in order to function. Delusion.
And when Helen said to me tonight, “You look exhausted,” I realized that following through on the plans I had made this evening was more an assertion of the “I” than accepting that this body I’d been observing so closely had finally run out of steam. So I didn’t feel disappointment that I couldn’t find a parking spot I so self-consciously knew I couldn’t slide into, at least not then. But I did realize some regret that all the imagined conversations would not take place, that the good wishes to the soon-to-graduate would not be made, at least not in festive surroundings—although I’ve rarely imagined and found reality to be even close to those imaginings. “All I’d imagined” is usually a wish more than a truth. Saturday evening and the music my friends played wasn’t (it was better), though in honesty, meeting my friends for the first time, face-to-face, was exactly as I imagined, and that’s more rare, finding no slippage between the virtual and the real.
The regret of earlier has since faded away. I can email Renee and ask her about the challenges of being Evangelical Christian and tolerant of difference at the same time. Did I really need to engage Jason in a conversation about Warren Zevon, likely to prove my superiority in knowledge of the man and his music? And I did want to talk with Joel, ask where he grew up, tell him I’m very self-aware and know I’m often a mess, though a happy mess. Yes, a happy mess. I think I like that.
Till later…
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