Passing Through

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 81

Today feels like a good day to empty out. I don’t mean that in any weird Gwyneth Paltrow goop way. I mean engaging with my body and my mind as an integrated whole and considering what I could do for them that would be restorative. I’m going to start by throwing out the old Chinese food in the refrigerator even though cold leftovers are my life. Everything that I regret, beginning with salty, greasy food and extending to obsessional thoughts about other people’s missteps, are temptations designed to mire me in a swamp of delusion. They pretend to be legitimate choices for how I might spend my time when in reality they are out to get me. They are untrustworthy conspirators plotting to highjack my wellbeing.

Photo by Fiona Doan on Unsplash

It would be salutary for me to think more deeply about what I consume, both what I eat and what I absorb into consciousness. My body and my mind walk hand in hand down the street as if they have always known one another, as if they have one another’s best interests at heart. In reality, they are, at this late date, just getting acquainted. I like to imagine them waking up one morning together free of mental and digestive bloat, the weight of anxiety no longer parked on the heart and cluttering the mind. If you’ve had days like that, moments like that, you know it’s a party with altogether different music. You may not have a name for it, but you know it when you hear its harmonies. It’s a clean, safe, quiet place. You can rest in this place.

I once confessed to a friend that I had been bad-mouthing someone in my mind while praying on Yom Kippur. He said, “that’s nothing. I was eating a ham sandwich.” All of this is a strategy for avoiding the essential emptiness inside, the vast unknowing. We’d rather have all our teeth pulled than feel that emptiness, that impermanence. The deep reality is that we are all only passing through. Like the breath in my lungs, the peaches in my stomach, the irritability that arises when I have to make adjustments of any kind, everything is on the move. It all goes by in the blink of an eye. My life, my experience is so impermanent, so much of the essence of a soap bubble that, hard as I try, I can’t possibly hold on to it. It’s the futile attempt to hold on that brings on the anguish, the distraction, the indigestion. Pete Seeger, a great Buddhist, had it right when he sang “Passing through, passing through/Sometimes happy, sometimes blue/Glad that I ran into you/Tell the people that you saw me passing through.”

Another beloved, Reb Zalman, the Jewish Renewal rabbi who died in 2014, used to say “Make your life a good trip for God.” It may well have been a psychedelic reference, Zalman was known to partake, but I always thought he was suggesting that each of us is like a freighter carrying a divine cargo during the course of our sojourn here. So holiness, however you envision that energy, is transported by us in the course of the everyday. At the dentist, in the cereal aisle. The more empty I am, the more holy energy I can carry. When I’m crammed full of fear, self-recrimination and junk food, I have no room for the precious cargo. There’s no room at the inn.

I’m fortunate now that I have no basement and no attic. I can meet the metaphor head-on and take a long, loving look at what I can do without to unburden myself. I can imagine sorting through my accumulated self-definitions. My vanity. My impatience. My mean girl. Lifting each one to the light, I turn it over to look carefully at its underside. Where did I get this? How long has it been sitting in the back of this drawer? Do I need it anymore? Emptying out is an arduous process. I don’t know how long it will take but, I think I may have time. There will not, in any case, be a giant garage sale like the day we donated all the mattresses and box springs from our bed and breakfast to a local Catholic church. There will be rather a slow letting go, more like a lazy snake shedding its skin bit by bit.

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