My Life as a Swinger

Dust flew as my feet hit the ground.  The dragging motion every time I reached the well worn middle slowed me down until it was safe to jump off. Mom had called me in for supper or my best friend wanted to play with me on the seesaw or it was getting dark-- for any of a number of reasons the swing always had to slow and stop so I could run on to other things.

I took such great joy in swinging when I was a child! My sturdy little legs pushing off, pumping and pumping, arms extended, head tilted back with the wind rushing through my hair, my toes tautly pointing to go higher, higher until I almost felt as though  I could set myself in orbit around the swing set. But the backward motion always followed the forward motion, the lows always followed the highs and the swing, eventually, always had to slow to a stop.

My legs are still sturdy-- thick ankles, big calves. I'm built more like a work horse than a race horse, much to the chagrin of my inner princess. Life has changed, though, since my playground days. The journey has become a bit more complicated than the one between the playground and the supper table, and the swing I ride these days is entirely inside my head.  Ups and downs, good days, bad days, highs and lows are all characterized as such by my own discernments, by a capricious inner judge, by an internal mental analytical service I must have signed up for sometime after I left the playground. 

For years the internal swinging was wild and crazy. Up one day, down the next, my mind would unfailingly and insistently tell me where I was-- in a good place, in a bad place, with the right person, with the wrong person, on the right path, on the wrong path. Not only that, there would always be this constant side commentary about what should be and what shouldn't be, about what was fair and what was unfair, how people should treat me and how they shouldn't treat me. It was exhausting, all this analysis, not to mention confusing because there were often conflicting thoughts. I bravely persisted for many years but eventually I became so tired, so overwhelmed by it all that my internal swing slowed down. It slowed way down. The clinical term for it was depression and I entered an entirely different phase of my life, one which my mind sought to characterize as hopeless. Yet I was getting sick, literally, of all the stuff my mind was telling me.  

There are gifts inherent in depression that we don't see when it first descends. Depression is a sane reaction to an insane world, a drawing down of the mind's awesome ability to call the shots. Oh, it still asserts itself. It tells you things like life is not worth living, things will never get better, and it uses the word failure a lot. For a while I bought into all of that and then I started noticing that some of the mind's last ditch attempts to maintain control didn't quite ring true. In fact, some of it was downright ridiculous. Sadly, it had never occurred to me to question my own thinking processes before. The minute it did, the tables began to turn. Hey, wait just a minute! How could there be nothing to live for when these three extraordinary children of mine, with their boundless enthusiasm, show me life in all its wonder day after day after day? All I had to do was pay attention. My children, with their beautiful beginner's minds, saved me.  They continue to save me. One questioned thought led to another and soon I was in the business of baloney detection and my mental operating system was undergoing a dramatic and life enhancing upgrade. 

These days the swing has slowed down to a gentle sway back and forth. This diminished movement reduces blur and enables me to see things more clearly and appreciate life as never before. The wild highs have been replaced by simple contentments which are far more fulfilling. The despairing lows matured into the grace of acceptance.

Life is not always easy. Life is not always kind. Eventually and inevitably life is taken from us entirely. Until that day I intend to make my best effort to choose happiness when a choice is offered (which is almost always) and practice my ability to accept adverse circumstance when it is not.  Author Karen Maezen Miller, in her book Momma Zen, says it best:

 "Happy matters most of all. And here's the surprise ending. You don't have to wait for happiness because there's no time but now to be happy.You don't have to go somewhere else because there's no place but here to find it. You don't have to do something else because there's nothing more to it. You don't have to get something else, because everything you already have is enough. You just have to be happy."

Simple, yet not always so easy in practice. But we have to do just that. Practice.

A Body of Evidence

OUCH! That hurts!! Suddenly we are in touch with our bodies. We touched the hot skillet, we missed the nail and hit our thumb with the hammer, we fell off the ladder and broke our leg, we did any one of a number of things we humans routinely do to cause ourselves physical pain. Or perhaps we did nothing on our own, perhaps we contracted a virus or got a disease or were injured in some way through no fault of our own. Suddenly our bodies become the focus of attention and what do we want? We want the pain to stop, we want the disease to go away, we want an end to whatever physical misery has come our way. We make the demand that things return to pain free normality and if we are lucky, and they do, our attention once again strays away from the body and out into the world.

Consider this. The relationship you have with your body is very much like the relationship you have with the people in your life. What would happen if you only paid attention to your children when they were misbehaving? You'd have some pretty rowdy children, would be my guess. What if you only spoke to your friends or your spouse when they displeased you and then only to express your disappointment or displeasure? You'd be in some pretty miserable relationships, I'd say. Yet, how often do we give our bodies positive attention, express gratitude, reverence, even adoration? It sounds embarrassingly uncomfortable, doesn't it? How did we get here, in this place where we take our bodies so for granted, where we have all these standards for how they should look, how they should feel, what they should be able to do, and all without a smidgen of recognition for the miracles they afford us every single day?

Our bodies have an estimated hundred trillion cells and each one of those cells performs six trillion tasks a second, a second, and each cell instantly knows what the other cells are doing. The astounding complexity of the human body boggles the mind. Just to scratch the top of your head involves a complex set of signals and instructions that represent an absolute miracle. Ask anyone with paralysis about this miracle, this gift that we take for granted every single day.

So, next time you stand in front of the mirror and critique your physical appearance, next time you take ill or suffer some injury, take a step back and consider your relationship with your body.  Take a moment for a deep bow to the mysterious gift of a human body, whatever its current state. You can be assured, your body is working hard to tend to your needs every single second whether or not you acknowledge its constant, unwavering, unselfish contribution. Talk about being loved unconditionally. There is a body of evidence to support the notion that it is your number one fan.

Two Buckets, Two Ways

1.

Jack and Jill went up the hill. They didn't know each other, mind you. In fact, they wouldn't have noticed each other at all if Jack hadn't stopped abruptly to look at the clouds, causing Jill to plow into him and drop the bucket she was carrying to market. Jill's bucket was dinged up pretty badly but when Jack offered to give her his own bucket which was new and shiny, Jill declined. She hurried away from him, anxious to get to market and fill her bucket. Jack smiled, nodded, and kept about his leisurely pace to market.

There was so much at market that day! Jill hoped she had enough time to get everything she wanted. She scurried from one vendor to another, filling her bucket with each new acquisition. Her bucket had suffered punctures in the fall and some things were spilling out. That made it hard to get it completely filled up and when she got home, after an exhausting day of searching and buying, she still felt as though she didn't have enough. She was determined to go to market the next day and get the things she'd missed.

And what of Jack? He made his way to market, arriving much later than Jill. Some of the vendors, in fact, had already closed, having sold all their goods. Jack was unperturbed, looked around a while, talked to a few people, found a few things he liked to put in his bucket and made his way home where he spent the evening smiling to himself and thinking about what a wonderful day it had been.

2.

In another part of town, astoundingly, another Jack and Jill were going up separate paths on another hill, this time to fetch some (you guessed it) water. This Jack also stopped to look at the clouds, at precisely the time their paths crossed, causing Jill to take a tumble and her bucket to fall. What are the odds?

Jack brought his bucket back, full of water, and was happy and content. Jill, on the other hand, had a damaged and leaky bucket now and by the time she arrived home more than half her water was gone.

Every day it was so. Jack made his way to the well and brought a full bucket of water back home. Jill lost more than half of her water on the way back from the hill and had to make many more trips as a result. Jack noticed Jill's dilemma and suggested she get herself a new bucket, but Jill, a creature of habit, was rather fond of her old bucket and paid him no mind. Through winter and into spring it was the same, Jack with his sturdy bucket and Jill with her leaky bucket making twice as many trips. 

It had been a dry spring that year and drought necessitated extra trips to the well for everyone. The hill was parched and dry and the municipality had issued a fire warning for the area. Usually vibrant with color this time of year, the hill for the most part was depressing to see. People took to using only one path up to the well, Jill's path, which inexplicably had a profusion of wild flowers blooming all along its perimeter.

The moral of the stories, you ask? Perhaps we are too eager to assign morals to stories. Perhaps things simply are the way they are.