Give It a Rest

As time goes on, you have to unload some baggage. The boat won’t continue to float if you don’t lighten up. This is usually about letting go of whatever you’ve been accustomed to hanging your hat on. For some people, that’s having an uncanny ability to throw the knuckle ball. For some people, it’s having more discretionary income than imagination. And for some, it’s being exceptionally good looking. I don’t have any of those problems. I’m epically unathletic, modest in substance and always a Betty, never a Veronica. My attachment has been to the life of the mind. I have lived in the space between my ears as if it were an East Village walk-up. It has been loud and crowded and sometimes rat-infested.

Neither of my parents drove a car, so our forays out of the city were infrequent. Sometimes, we’d get a ride to Nyack where my mother’s childhood friend, Jeanette, lived. Without fail, I remember feeling that it was not possible that people lived in such a place. My awareness of the larger life involving trees, rivers, weeping, sickness was limited. My mind sat on my heart like a top hat. It reached up. It put on airs. Sometimes it did a soft-shoe.

But the mind, like the lower back, gets tired. It wants to step aside, contemplate retirement, give the heart some room to maneuver. I can tell my mind is tired when other people’s material, so brilliant and enticing that it glitters like mica, gives me a headache. I consider the possibility that I’m jealous or just plain old. I have to allow for that, but neither of those explanations really accounts for the pressure in my head when the windows of empathy are painted shut and all I’ve got is a naked bulb, no natural light. It isn’t who I want to be any more. I maintain my relationship with my brain by doing the Spelling Bee in the Times every day, but it’s a relationship of convenience. I don’t have my heart in it. In my experience, the people who can keep both of those balls in the air at the same time are few and far between. My brother-in-law was like that, a lamed vavnik. Every day, he read an entire book, cooked for everyone in sight, then read another entire book. He was old school, seemed to have walked right out of a cafe in Paris by way of the Bronx. Loved coffee, wine, cigarettes, and words. He was a world class talker, but when you were doing the talking, he looked right at you. You were all that mattered.

That’s all I want, really. To see and be seen, but not in the good-table-at-a-restaurant way. I want to experience the delight and suffering that other people feel, share the joy of the new grandchild and witness the suffering of declining health, But, equally and with more struggle, I want to become more transparent to those good people around me so they can see past my so-clever protective facade to the beating heart of my more vulnerable, aging self. I am in the process of putting glib out to pasture and a funny thing is happening on the way to this new territory. I am finding that there are some folks, just a few I’m happy to say, I can’t walk with. Maybe later. Just now, there are a few people that generate a loud noise like a pneumatic drill inside my head that disrupts my fragile wellbeing. I am reminded of the famous Rumi poem…

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you

there. / When the soul lies down in that grass, / the world is too full to talk about.

If the possibility of silence isn’t there, I can’t let my words come out of hiding and I can’t receive the other person’s words. No room at the inn. Stephen Levine, whose books about death and dying I’ve been reading, writes that “Compassion is just space.” I love that downgrading of the mystery of compassion to something that is “just” anything and I think I get it. It’s not about moving on the other person like a sloppy drunk on a barstool. It’s not about feeding on him like a deer tick. It’s walking side by side in the tall grass of this life, feeling the breeze, listening to the birds, inhaling the sweet air all around the two of you and feeling the enormous blessing of being here on this earth at the same time together.