by Geneen Roth
The next morning I decided to buy the vest. But as I started walking to the phone, the fight with myself began. I want to be the kind of person who is no longer enchanted by things. If I was born in Asia, I’d be a wise elder wearing plain blue cotton shirts and long gray braids. I’d be doing tai chi outside in town squares, playing checkers and consorting with other braided women about how best to handle the rabble-rousing young hellions. I need to meditate more, disengage from my thoughts—not buy more clothes. Because when I am on my deathbed —which is closer now than it was last year or the year before—having a blue vest won’t matter—and I want to spend my energy on what does.
As I skulked to the bathroom, I decided that I really was hopeless, a spiritual failure. Then, as I was brushing my teeth, I thought, but in that case, why not be hopeless in a blue vest?
It shouldn’t be a conundrum, but it is.
I shouldn’t love things, but I do.
Although I am well aware that you become what you love, as the Sufis say, I don’t seem to be able to help being who I am or loving what I love, especially beauty in its myriad forms. The dazzle of first morning light. My motorcycle boots with the red rhinestone boot belt. Matt’s face. A blue vest. To the extent that there is a quandary, it is with my belief that beauty is defined by its forms, particularly those that are young and dewy-faced or silky and impractical.
As a teenager, after reading hundreds of Glamour magazines, I was convinced that the antidote to feeling ugly was to become an actress or a model (and be seen as being beautiful). In eighth grade I told my classmates I’d been cast as an orphan in the Broadway show Oliver, in which Bartley Larson, one of our friends, was already starring. Unfortunately, since the whole class was given season tickets to the show and I never appeared in it, they discovered that I had an elastic relationship with the truth.
In tenth grade I played the role of an ailing debutante in a skit opposite my real-life heartthrob Martin Howard, and bombed so completely (I had a hard enough time being myself; being someone else was impossible) that in the auditorium of a few hundred people, only my mother clapped when I took my bow.
Undeterred in my attempts to mesmerize people, I decided to become a model. Wearing a white A-line dress with pale blue lines and looking like a well-outfitted tent, I renamed myself Geneen Howard, dragged my brother to the Barbizon School in Manhattan, and presented myself to the receptionist. She asked me to get on the scale (I weighed 110 pounds), told me I was too fat and that my legs were too short.
When it became obvious that a trend of five-foot-three stubby-legged models would not begin with me, I narrowed my focus to keeping my skin smooth, my muscles toned, and my hair shiny in hopes of approximating a culturally acceptable version of “attractive.” It worked. Until it didn’t. At thirty, I looked like I was in high school. At forty-five or fifty, I looked like I was thirty. But at sixty-five, I could walk down the street with my hair on fire, as my friend Catherine says, and no one would notice. Although I still feel youngish, and that “everyone my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise,” as Margaret Atwood puts it, I am still somewhat shocked when I ask for a senior discount at the movie theater and there is no protest. If I see a friend for the first time in a few years, I wonder whether he’s had a stroke or is dying because he looks so diminished. And then I realize that he’s probably wondering the same about me.
If I see a friend for the first time in a few years, I wonder whether he’s had a stroke or is dying because he looks so diminished. And then I realize that he’s probably wondering the same about me.
At first I was confused by getting older (why can’t I read the small print?), then offended (for God’s sake, who on earth could read this?), and finally, I surrendered (progressive lenses, I decided, were eye jewelry: cool). But just when I thought I’d reached an aging plateau, my chin disappeared into my neck and I started looking like my jowly father when he was dying. My arms soon followed. They began looking speckled, like I’d just taken off a polka-dot sweater (who even knew that arm cellulite existed?), and every morning there were more lines around my eyes and my mouth, although, because I couldn’t see without my glasses, I wasn’t certain.
Despite the fact that everyone who doesn’t die young gets old, I must have believed that getting older was a choice, and since I wasn’t making it, it wouldn’t happen to me. And until recently (except for the eye jewelry), I haven’t been a model of “aging with grace.” Just as I used to stand in front of the mirror and pull back the fat on my thighs to see what they would look like if I lost twenty pounds, I pull back what Anne Lamott calls “the Utah desert on my neck” to see what I would look like without it. It’s as if I fantasize that looking younger will give something back to me that I lost (besides my chin). Or that there’s only one way to see the lines around my eyes or the folds above them: as traitors to be vanquished. Since I’ve ruled out plastic surgery for many reasons (death by anesthetic, threats of divorce, feeling as if my head is in a tourniquet post-face-lift), I am left with either fighting the ever-increasing effects of having lived this long or taking time out to reconsider the meaning of beauty.
Years ago my teacher Jeanne told me to think of my eyes as catchers’ mitts. “See what is there,” she said, “and allow yourself to take it in, be filled by what you see,” which reminded me of what the novelist Albert Cossery wrote: “So much beauty . . . , so few eyes to see it.” Could it be that beauty is about seeing, and not about being seen? And that though a particular form is the transport mechanism (the way that bread is the delivery system for butter), it is the effect of beauty—the rapture of it—that actually elevates and inspires. And while it’s true that I had moments of rapture when I was acceptably attractive, I also had months of melancholy. My well-defined neck and butt were not causative in either the rapture or the melancholy. The only thing—and I’ve traveled the earth looking—that has brought me ever-present joy is to see what I see, wake myself to the splendor in small things, and appreciate, appreciate, appreciate.
Could it be that beauty is about seeing, and not about being seen?
Which brings me back to you-know-what.
“It is rather striking,” Matt said, when I opened the UPS package in which the blue vest was nested. “And when you wear it, you can quote Liberace and say: ‘I didn’t come here to go unnoticed.’ ” I reminded myself that Matt has many fine qualities—humor, generosity, a heart as wide as the Grand Canyon—and that in our twenty-nine years together he has stopped me from looking like a shrub and a bear, but that he’s not always right. Sometimes he misses the point of adornment for the joy of it, which is, in my opinion, one of the splendors of having a body. And since that body comes with a multitude of challenges, it’s important to revel in the available joys.
The ancient philosopher Plotinus said, “Beauty must ever induce a wonderment and a delicious trouble . . . a trembling that is all delight.” Now, instead of pulling back the skin on my neck, I wear the blue ocean to buy zucchini at the store. I go to parties, and when everyone else is wearing T-shirts and jeans, I’m dressed in blue enchantment, awash in delight.
In the next moment the person I usually knew as myself wasn’t there, but something else was. And it was huge and lush, utterly still and completely at ease.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
Not Minding What Happens
When I was in Ojai, California, last year, I visited the home of Krishnamurti, the philosopher who died in 1986. I sat in the room in which he ate, walked the land on which he walked, and meditated under his favorite tree. I was hoping I would see what he saw, feel what he felt, know what he knew. I was hoping for enlightenment-by-osmosis.
In Krishnamurti’s Notebook, a book of his journal writings, he describes the delicacy of a rosebush planted in a container on a corner of a deck in Paris. I was struck by the fact that although he was in the city that housed Monet’s Water Lilies, Rodin’s sculpture garden, and chocolate croissants, Krishnamurti dar
ed to attend to the smallest beauty. And that often when he did, “the otherness” would arise. And it was so huge, so encompassing, that it dissolved everything we usually think of as a person—thoughts, emotions, beliefs. He wasn’t frightened of it. He didn’t fight it. He didn’t conjure up, say, his relationship with his mother so that he could become his familiar self and climb back into the shape of his personality as he knew it.
I’ve had glimpses of this otherness; one of them occurred yesterday, when I was sitting in my backyard. My mind was burbling on like an all-news radio station about my friend Mo, who was supposed to call me back and didn’t, the fact that I needed to call the guys who pump out the septic tank because it’s been too long, the emails that were piling up, and the dream I’d had the night before about meeting Patti Smith in front of a taco food truck. Then, in an effort that felt like chewing nails, I pulled my attention from the noise machine of my mind to the sun on my legs, the smell of sky, and the rustling of leaves in the wind. In the next moment the person I usually knew as myself wasn’t there, but something else was. And it was huge and lush, utterly still and completely at ease. Thoughts were flying by in the background but since I wasn’t involved with them, they disappeared without a trace.
Then I remembered the septic tank, and my usual sense of self—rushed, slightly irritated—sprang like a Slinky into its tightly coiled form. And with the onrush of thoughts, I noticed an almost imperceptible relief, like the feeling of being able to speak in English after I’ve spent a week in Mexico, reaching for the Spanish words for bathroom, bank, and bed. Home at last.
When you stop minding what isn’t here (a friend, a house, a spouse), you can open yourself to what is.
Krishnamurti writes, “woke up in the middle of the night, with the otherness in the room. It was there with great intensity, not only filling the room and beyond but . . . deep down within the brain, so profoundly that it seemed to go through and beyond all thought, space and time. . . . Strangely every time this takes place, it’s something totally new, unexpected and sudden . . . beyond all thought, desire and imagination. . . . It’s not an illusion.”
One night someone in an audience of a few hundred people asked Krishnamurti his secret, the essence of his teaching. Speaking in a soft voice, Krishnamurti’s answer was “I don’t mind what happens.” So simple, I thought, but not easy. Although I have a visa to the country of Otherness, I don’t live there. I keep returning to my familiar self like a toddler keeps running back to her mother.
I thought of our friend Clementine, who, a few hours after escaping from the fire that destroyed her home, arrived at our house. “Everything is gone,” she said, “even my favorite pair of red Dansko shoes. Even my dark green leather motorcycle jacket, my new silk underwear. Even the bank that was holding my safety-deposit box with my jewelry and passport burned down.” We cried about her house, the deer with the broken knee living under her deck, and the flock of quail she fed every day on her porch. “I don’t think they made it to higher ground,” she said, tearfully.
A few hours later, after drinking tea and wrapping ourselves in fuzzy blankets, I said, “It’s probably true that everything is gone, but let’s hold out for the possibility that your red Danskos are still there, on top of a heap of ashes.”
During the first week after the fire, Clementine was careful about not allowing her mind to wander to what she had lost, or where she would live, or the fact that she didn’t have insurance or savings enough to last long. She was awash in grief and gratitude for being alive, and for the generosity of people she knew and strangers in stores. (While shopping for socks in her favorite store, a stranger, upon hearing the story of the fire, bought Clementine a burgundy cashmere sweater, after which I told her that she should go shopping in Silicon Valley among the billionaires. Someone might buy you a house, I said, or a small island.)
Since she had nothing to lose, she had nothing to protect. It was like living with someone without skin, whose heart was cracked open, whose face was lit. “If I don’t think about what I lost,” she said, “nothing is missing.”
It seems that when you stop minding what isn’t here (a friend, a house, a spouse), you can open yourself to what is. And when you do, it feels as if you’ve popped out of a small, cramped costume you’ve been wearing for many lifetimes. The boots were too tight, the buttons had fallen off, and although you were reluctant to let them go—they were so familiar that they’d taken the shape of you—the otherness of freedom calls you, even when you’ve unzipped into something or someone you don’t recognize. Even when what remains is only the toe of a ruby slipper on the heap of what you once called your life.
Look up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Snorkeling in the Night Sky
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last minute turn into princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave; perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
—Rilke
Night comes swiftly like “a great, dark, soft thing,” and for most of my life I’ve greeted it reluctantly, as if behind the darkness lurked terror and shattered hearts. My mother says, “You were a fast napper from the day you were born. Other kids went down for two hours. You slept for twenty minutes and were up for the rest of the day.” Even as an infant, I didn’t want to surrender to that dark, soft thing.
After an early menopause I started waking up three, four, five times a night. At first I tried natural remedies (melatonin, bio-identical hormones, cortisol adaptogens), then unnatural ones (drugs). But since I have a paradoxical reaction to drugs—Ambien kept me awake, and during the second week I took Ativan (the first week was heavenly)—I developed suicidal proclivities and wanted to jump off a bridge. Then I downloaded sleep music, tried brain-balancing techniques, listened to books on tape (Middlemarch, Team of Rivals, and A Passage to India are still my favorites; also anything by Bill Bryson, except he makes me cackle, which wakes up my husband, which makes two of us wide awake at three a.m.). Still, night after night, my eyes flew open like clockwork—and with them began the rattling of my mind and the descent into the catastrophic (the pain in my chest is congestive heart failure, I’m sure of it), the ugly (I’ve been married to the wrong person for thirty years), and the uglier (was that noise a rapist? Where’s my gun? Oh, right, I don’t have one).
In her book Marrow, Elizabeth Lesser calls this litany “middle of the nightism,” and she urges us not to believe any thoughts that occur between midnight and six in the morning. To that wise advice I would add, “and stop reading articles that tell you that not getting enough sleep can lead to Alzheimer’s, ALS, and autoimmune disease,” particularly if, like me, you might be a teeny bit prone to hypochondria.
A few months ago, after lying in bed like a pencil in a drawer for hours each night, trying desperately to be peaceful and instead feeling insane and judgmental (“After forty years meditating, you still can’t quiet your mind?”), I decided that if I couldn’t sleep, I shouldn’t sleep, and that there must be something I could do that didn’t require putting on lights (because as every insomniac knows, you’re supposed to turn down all lights at dusk, and keep your bedroom cool and dark to facilitate ongoing melatonin release). I remembered an article in The New Yorker in which the author says that before the advent of electricity and artificial light, people didn’t sleep through the night; they’d sleep when it got dark—Sleep One—and after a few hours, they’d wake up, congregate in small groups, and chat convivially. Then, they’d trundle off to their stacks of hay and revive themselves with more sleep, which was called Sleep Two.
Visiting friends in the middle of the night, having tea, biscuits, and a chat in flannel pajamas sounds quite civilized to me. Like these newly emergent death cafes where “strangers gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death . . . to help [them] make the most of their finite lives,” in a sleepless cafe strangers
could huddle together and discuss being awake in the middle of the night. But since I live in the forest, half an hour away from any place where insomniacs might huddle, I decided to start my own nighttime ritual.
Now when my eyes fly open at three, I follow my breath from my toes to the top of my head and back again a few times, then I do the four-seven-eight sleep breath count (four on the in breath, seven on the top of the breath, eight on the out breath). Sometimes I listen to the elegiac writing of George Eliot and if Mr. Casaubon doesn’t aggravate me too much, I might fall asleep. But if I’m still awake after fifteen minutes, I say in a purposefully cheerful whisper: “Time to go visiting!” (The cheerful part is necessary to drown out and reprogram the doleful lament at not being able to sleep.) I slip into my bright pink slippers with the floppy felt turquoise flowers, pad into the dark hall with my arms outstretched like a zombie so that I don’t bang into walls and trip over chairs, inch my way to the back door, exchange the slippers for my black knee-high Wellingtons (which I placed by the door the night before), put on my husband’s puffy pumpkin-colored Antarctica coat, and grope for the door.
Creak, door opens.
Creak, door closes.
Step down.
Look up.
And just like that, I am in another world.
The glittering bowl of the sky is so vast that it seems as if I am upside down, like the first time I went snorkeling and saw that the ocean had an underneath: undulating anemones, knobs of rutilant coral, neon purple and green rainbow fish that must have been here all along but because I never looked below the surface, I never knew.
