This Messy Magnificent Life

by Geneen Roth

  I couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of being alive if I stopped working so hard to get more of what I already had.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  Hummingbirds on My Fingers

  For many years, I lived in a twilight zone between wanting more and having enough. Between knowing that having more (experiences, love, success) would not add anything to my life, and still believing that the point of life was the getting-of-more. Also, there was the letdown of not knowing what else to do; I couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of being alive if I stopped working so hard to get more of what I already had.

  For fifty-five years my father left the house at five in the morning, worked all day, and walked in again at midnight. In his seventy-six years on earth he had four wives, two children, five hundred neckties, fifteen Mont Blanc pens, one hundred watches, and three dozen Paul Stuart suits. When he was diagnosed with lymphoma and could no longer work, he turned into fog. He had nothing to say—literally, nothing—and when you looked into his face, it was blank. I never knew it was possible to fall away like that. Without the ability to work hard and get more stuff with the money he made by working hard, he became utterly unmoored. Which is—unmoored, that is—how I felt six years ago when, after a series of protracted illnesses, my doctor told me it was imperative that I “rest more and work less. But only if you want to be alive in a year.”

  In desperation, I looked around for role models besides my father. Ann Patchett, a writer whose work I admired, wrote that if you weren’t working on a book (which I wasn’t), an hour of writing a day allows you to stay nimble with words. So I wrote every day. Sometimes a sentence came and I felt as if I was soaring on the lilt of a particular word. Purpling. Dauntless. Spangled. But most of the time I sat at my desk and plodded, wrote crummy sentences, flimsy paragraphs.

  Then came the challenging part: I stepped outside to see if the double ruffle peonies that one of my students gave me were growing. I gazed at the feathery new leaves of the Japanese maple trees. I looked up at the sky. I listened to the birds. But all the while, I felt as if I was going to get in trouble, as if I wasn’t supposed to be looking at flowers or watching birds or smelling the air. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon for God’s sake, I’d say to myself, and there are girls getting raped in Africa, children starving in Syria, elephants being killed for their tusks. If you’re not at your desk working, at least save a child or a whale or an ocean.

  I know a therapist who only works two weeks a month. When she told me that, my first response was “You’re not allowed to do that. It’s against the rules. If you’re privileged enough to have enough money to work two weeks a month, then you need to spend those two extra weeks saving the planet or, at the very least, the dogs that people throw off bridges.” After I spoke, she looked inquisitively at me, as therapists are wont to do. “Whose voice is that?” she asked.

  It’s not a voice, I told her. It’s the truth. Get to work.

  A student recently told me that if she accepted the fact that losing weight by dieting didn’t touch the root of her self-hatred, she was certain that she’d spend the rest of her life “on the couch with dirty hair in ever-expanding muumuus eating cream puffs and watching reruns of The West Wing.”

  Although dieting didn’t solve what prompted it, at least “I’m doing something. Dieting is the constant in my life. It keeps the hope alive that whatever despair lies hidden will be resolved with weight loss. Even though I’ve been on dozens of ultimately failed diets, there’s always a chance that the next one will be the one.”

  One of my wise teachers, Jeanne, pointed out that if I was working so hard that my health was suffering, I must have an unspoken belief that its potential benefits outweighed its costs—and that I would get something I didn’t already have. Something upon which my life depended. Do you know what that is, she asked?

  Jeanne was waiting for a reply. I tried to change the subject, since, like my students, I didn’t want to know what I knew. Striving for some big thing in the future was the glue that kept the machine of my life together; without it, I was afraid I’d become a banana slug, oozing in contentment but going nowhere. Or like my father, who without that striving turned into fog.

  “So,” Jeanne said, “what is so important that having it is worth ruining your health?”

  “Undeniable value and self-worth,” I finally answered.

  “And is it working?” she asked.

  “Not so well,” I answered. “When I am lonely or sick, I can’t go to sleep clutching a bestseller list. And as I pad through the days, the familiar melancholy hasn’t disappeared by having thinner thighs, knowing Matt, or reminding myself that people I don’t know and will never meet like my book.”

  “What about just allowing the part that doesn’t feel value or self-worth? Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is. Maybe it’s just a feeling . . .”

  Since feeling into and allowing what’s here to be here is my practice, I do it (often while kicking and screaming on the way). And of course, in the end—and that day—it reveals itself as only a feeling, and like any other feeling, it most wants to be welcomed and witnessed as part of the pantheon of the thousand other feelings that have come and gone.

  A few months after that session, I spent a few days filming a conversation with Eckhart Tolle. Within five minutes of being with him, it was clear to me that if he ended up on the park bench where he’d spent two years penniless, not one iota of his experience of worth or spaciousness would change. Not because he said so, but because with every step, with every word, he transmits quiet and infinite affection.

  I’ve practiced meditating with a long line of teachers since I lived in India in my mid-twenties, but either because I wasn’t ready to change or the language they were speaking didn’t make sense to me, the nub of who I took myself to be (worthless, lost, unlovable) never shifted. And after meeting Eckhart, I saw that it never would. The chubby eleven-year-old with the crooked bangs was never going to feel lithe and lovely. But so what? Those self-images were frozen in time, and if I didn’t invest them with meaning or take myself to be them, they could float through my mind without leaving a trace. In the years following my meeting Eckhart, it became apparent to me that it wasn’t the thoughts about worthlessness that were the problem, it was that I took myself to be them. The very second I allowed the worthlessness to be there without engaging or reacting to it, I was free.

  When I wrote my first book proposal, my father said, “Forget getting published, will you? Someone sent a Charles Dickens book to a publisher without attributing the book to Dickens, and it was rejected. What makes you think you’re better than Dickens?” But then I remembered my writing teacher, Ellen Bass, and the fact that she’d published a book after receiving 154 rejections that she’d used as bathroom wallpaper. She was the living model for me, the proof that an ordinary human being with persistence and respect for the craft could be a writer. And since I’d always wanted to write, I decided that if it was possible for Ellen, it was possible for me.

  Your life is nothing more than the hundred million moments, mostly ordinary, of padding to the kitchen and getting a cup of tea and cooking oatmeal for your kids and sitting in traffic or at your computer. It all comes down to one breath and then another, one step and then the next.

  When I met Eckhart and he said, “You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances in your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level,” I knew in a flash that I wanted that more than I’d wanted anything, ever—and that that longing was at the bottom of every other want I’d ever had. Because without that, I’d always want more. But with that, I’d have what I was secretly convinced working obsessively or another person’s love was going to give me: spaciousness, ease, and joy. I’d have everything.

  I also knew that if Eckhart could know himself on the deepest level, I could, too. And that I had a choice. I could continue to pursue success and be like the actress in a New York Times articl
e about Oscar winners, who described “swanning into the Academy Awards in a lavish gown provided free from a name designer on a Sunday, only to wake up in a Studio City apartment a week later with dead bouquets and no flashing light on the answering machine.” Or I could place my attention on the want of all wants.

  Finally I understood that if I truly longed for peace and lightness, clarity and joy, I didn’t have to wait; I could have them now. If I wanted to feel like I was allowed to take up space here on earth, I could occupy the space I already had. And if I wanted to know who I was at the deepest level, I could keep bringing my attention back to the blaze of the life force before my attention constellated around a thought or a story.

  The writer Annie Dillard said that “the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.” That your life is nothing more than the hundred million moments, mostly ordinary, of padding to the kitchen and getting a cup of tea and cooking oatmeal for your kids and sitting in traffic or at your computer. It all comes down to one breath and then another, one step and then the next. And when you get to the end of your life, it no longer matters whether you were once president of something (a company, a country), or whether you were on the New York Times bestseller list for fifty weeks or the recipient of a Nobel Prize. All that will matter is whether you flowered here in earth school. Whether you brought yourself to your relationships with kindness, or with reactivity. Whether you shut your heart or opened it, even in the face of rejection. Whether you know who and what you are beyond the thoughts that come and go, beyond the achievements that our gotta-get-more culture worships.

  Now I write for five or six hours a day, and then I stand outside with my arms outstretched like tree limbs. Hummingbirds have become my constant companions. It took weeks of standing still as a statue for the first one to come close. They arrive in droves and I am often so dazzled by their iridescent beauty and feathery feet that I feel as if I am going to faint.

  I realized I could keep living like a five-foot-tall piece of Velcro with giant pieces of past anxiety or anticipated future stuck to me— or I could stop.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Crushed Stars

  Last night I dreamt that my body was made of crushed stars and black space—and so was everything I saw or touched. Since I used to dream that a serial killer was loose in our house, waking up in a body of stars in a room of stars was a new occurrence. This morning when I opened my eyes I felt like air and light were looking through me, as if I’d gone to sleep as a person and woken up as a galaxy.

  After thirty minutes I wasn’t sure what to do. How do stars get out of bed? How do they walk to the bathroom? Do stars eat eggs and toast for breakfast? Do they kiss anyone, or do they just glow? (Reality check: A few years ago, I discovered that stars are mostly made of hydrogen and, therefore, are very hot and extremely noisy. Also, that they are not shaped like stars. But oh well.)

  That’s when my mind began its centrifugal whirl and began picking up leftover feelings and self-images from the day before: how hurt I was at what Carolyn said to me; how special I felt after being asked to give a talk at a large venue. With each remembered circumstance, I added more layers of my grumpy, grandiose self. By the time I swung my feet over the side of the bed, I knew exactly who I was. I was needy and wounded. I was special. I was sad. I was a failure. I was a success. But I was definitely not a crushed star.

  In my twenties, after I’d made love with a married man in my mother’s cedar closet on top of my grandmother’s mink coat, and left for India a short time later, where I lived like a nun for four months, I felt like two people. One longed to live in a cave and give up everything she had in order to discover the meaning of it all; the other liked trouble and chocolate, and wanted, as Ouiser Boudreaux says in Steel Magnolias, more money than God.

  Although I’ve moved on from wanting riches or caves, I still take myself to be an astonishing array of selves—and they change all the time. The way I saw myself when I was ten (moon face, bad hair, chubby legs, not popular with the boys) was different than at eighteen (long, straight, sought-after hair, suddenly popular with the boys, still chubby), which was different than at thirty (aspiring writer, bad hair again, emerging from years of obsession). None of it, or them, endures.

  As I sat on the edge of the bed, I realized that I could keep this up for the rest of my life: every morning, when I open my eyes (and after that, throughout the day), I can keep slipping into my old, familiar selves the way I slip into my favorite clothes, layer by layer: my favorite day-of-the-week underwear, my lacy bra, my gray-striped cashmere socks, faded jeans, and pink cashmere sweater. I put on some hair product (enough, it must be noted, to make my hair stand up and walk off without me), my geeky-chic tortoiseshell glasses, and within a few minutes I’m recognizable as me again.

  On that star-studded morning, I saw that, depending on the situations I’ve encountered the day before, I get dressed in my favorite beliefs, my well-worn feelings. By the time I brush my teeth, I am someone who either has enough or who is lacking. As I walk to the kitchen for breakfast, I walk as someone who is incredibly special or irreversibly doomed.

  Drama becomes me. Enthralls me. But that morning I couldn’t ignore how clunky I felt when dressed in it. How burdened. And I realized I could keep living like a five-foot-tall piece of Velcro with giant pieces of past anxiety or anticipated future stuck to me—or I could stop. I could choose to be a crushed star or I could choose to pledge allegiance to my history, my stories, my ideas of what should and shouldn’t have happened.

  I hate it when someone tells me I have a choice about having or feeling clarity or joy or lightness (even when that someone is myself); it feels like being told to cheer up, that the world is a happy place when I know it’s falling apart. I’m used to blaming people, and then complaining about what a bad hand I was dealt. Getting dressed in layers of feelings and fears, while being burdensome, has the benefit of history, heft, and substance, whereas, let’s face it, being a crushed star sounds pretty but isn’t very practical when it comes to making tea or winning an argument.

  But I may—don’t hold me to it—be tired of getting dressed in my same old pink cashmere abuse; this daily re-upping process is beginning to feel exhausting. It reminds me of what my Buddhist teacher Lama Seden told me: even if you decorate your cell with sunflowers and roses, even if you put chintz and handmade lace on the bars, it’s still a prison. Why not turn the lock, open the door, and walk out?

  But each time I take the proverbial leap from the racket of my mind, there is a sudden, radiant freedom.

  There isn’t anything I want more—not love, not success, not even the new cool belt I saw online—than to walk out of the prison of this endless siren song of myself. When I walk in the forest, I want to notice the light through the trees instead of coming up with the brilliant thing I should have said to my friend last week. When I eat breakfast, I want to taste the toast and not the leftover hurt. The ongoing low-level discourse about why what happened shouldn’t have happened—whether it be about stubbing my toe, what my husband or the president of the United States said, or how JoJo treated me yesterday—has not exactly led to clarity or ease.

  I used to say in my retreats that attention is the way you bless yourself with love. The moment of choosing to drag my attention away from the drama (and promise) of the story is the blessing-with-love part. Which means it feels like taking a flying leap into the unknown. (Last spring, as I held my breath, the baby finch in the nest outside the back door tried her first flight; she hopped to the edge of the beam and jumped. One second later, she was drowning in the swimming pool and I was soaking wet from saving her. Not exactly a poster child for jumping into the unknown.) But each time I take the proverbial leap from the racket of my mind, there is a sudden, radiant freedom, as if who I was taking myself to be a moment before has suddenly dissolved, and in its place is the incandescent shine and fierce white heat of a crushed star.

  “No” and �
��I don’t want to” are complete sentences. Also, being nice is overrated.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  What Remains

  Afew years ago my therapist of ten years said, “I think you’re done, Geneen. You’ve worked hard, and you can continue, but I think you’re done.”

  Done? While I knew that I might be finished with therapy someday, I didn’t think done would look like this.

  I thought I would be fixed. That all I needed was to try hard, do what I was told, feel what I’d never allowed myself to feel as a child, and my nervous system would be calm and cushioned; I’d live in parasympathetic mode like my husband does, where everything is already and always okay. Someone used your name, address, and social security number to buy a phone and charge a hundred dollars’ worth of calls in one day? No problem, sweetheart: call Verizon, cancel the charges, and relax.

  It’s not that I imagined waking up as a completely different person; it’s just that at the end of therapy, I thought my familiar obsessions and neuroses would have been scoured with quintessential Borax so only the sparkling, sane parts would remain. With the right combination of brilliant therapists and awakened spiritual teachers I’d be healed, permanently fixed, and for the rest of my life I’d be free.

  Instead, there are times when I still feel like an exposed nerve. There are still situations—after a few sleepless nights, a long illness, or a series of frustrating interactions—in which I devolve into a state of bitterness and envy. And some mornings still find me repeating the mantra that Joseph Goldstein, my first Buddhist teacher, once uttered: “Oy vey, another day. Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”