It occurs to me…

Photo taken in Malibu last year.

Steve Goodman’s song Videotape came up on my playlist and I fell for it again; found out the words had mostly stuck with me:

If your life was on videotape, wouldn’t everything be alright

When your head hurt the morning after, you could roll it back to late last night

You could replay all of the good parts, and cut out what you don’t like

Wouldn’t you be in great shape, if your life was on video tape

Goodman notes in later verses that this is fantasy.  He doesn’t have ESP, a crystal ball, or even a video recorder.  He can’t predict the future or change the past.  None of us can.  (That is, we never had the other things, and in 2020, don’t have video recorders.)

All the more reason, it occurs to me, to be mindful and live in the present.

More from Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:

“When everything falls apart and we feel uncertainty, disappointment, shock, embarrassment, what’s left is a mind that is clear, unbiased, and fresh.  But we don’t see that.  Instead we feel the queasiness and uncertainty of being in no-man’s land and enlarge the feeling and march it down the street with banners that proclaim how bad everything is.”

She forgot to mention Drum Major, that guy in front of the banner, the one wearing that ridiculously high hat and waving that big baton.  That is often me!

Ironically, I guess, I got a laugh today out of my reading from Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart.  She notes that when things fall apart, one tendency is to try to recreate ourselves.  That is, rather than settle in with the conflict and try to learn something about ourselves in the struggle, we decide to recreate ourselves “as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble.”  Chodron incites the laugh with the observation that: “Just as we are on the verge of really understanding something, allowing our heart to truly open, just as we have the opportunity to see clearly, we put on [Groucho Marx glasses] with fluffy eyebrows and a big nose.”

Indeed, in a world filled with the commercially driven theme that a “new you” (whether Groucho Marx glasses, a new hair color, car, vacation, new exercise equipment…) is only a keyboard, credit card, and same day Amazon delivery away, creating a whole new you seems temptingly so much easier than taking time to sit down with the “old you” for a while, taking stock of where things are, and contemplating just what lesson this struggle has to offer.  And conveniently, I can then blame the struggle on the prior absence of that _____ in my life – that is, until the next struggle.

So just where can I get those Groucho Marx glasses?

This hard to take in lesson today from Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart:

“[W]hat we habitually regard as obstacles are not really our enemies, but rather our friends.  What we call obstacles are really they way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck….  Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast.  But what we find…is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

This  is the same sentiment in Rumi’s The Guest House as translated by Coleman Barker:

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be cleaning you out

for some new delight….

Be grateful for whoever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

It occurs to me that I am not sure which is stronger here – my urge to resist these thoughts or my begrudging recognition of them as truths.  Onward.

We take a blank page, and we put something on it — a line, a quality, a criteria, some point of reference to orient us and them. Then we decide where we each are in relation to that; “right” or “left,” “above” or “below,” “for” or “against,” “in” or “out,” even “good” or “bad,” ignoring all the while the obvious truths: there is no line, and no matter where we place one we are all still on the same page.

Photo taken at moon rise over the park by our house.  Text was in my reading for today and seemed to fit.

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron writes on how our emotions control us (pleasure and pain, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace), particularly when we undertake to eradicate (as opposed to rolling with) them.  She writes:

“The human race is so predictable.  A tiny thought arises, then escalates, and before we know what hits us, we’re caught up on hope and fear….  Before we know it, we’ve composed a novel on why someone is so wrong, or why we are so right, or why we must get such and such.”

I know I have a library full of those novels, even more short stories, and my head is full of drafts in progress.  In not so many words, she suggests a book burning.

“Therefore, we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”  2 Cor. 4:16

While true every day, this just seemed like a good thing to hear today.

From Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart, this on “refraining”:

“Refraining is one of those uptight words that sound repressive.  Surely, alive, juicy, interesting people would not practice refraining.  Maybe they would sometimes refrain, but not as a lifestyle….  It’s the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming in.  It’s the practice of not immediately filling up spaces just because there’s a gap.”

I do that a lot, try to fill in the gaps.  In conversation (no one likes that awkward silence), in my calendar (productivity, “the idle mind is the devil’s workshop,”…), the empty bookshelf shelf in my office that empty spot in my garden.  A lot of time and effort is spent filling in the gaps, as if there is something inherently wrong with a gap.  Yet it occurs to me (or perhaps I should say, it seems $%*#@ obvious on reflection) that the gaps are where the peace is.  Chodron notes: “It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space.”  Maybe the gap, the space, needs to be filled in, maybe not.  Maybe someone else will handle it, or not.  This is where the refraining comes in.