the specialness of our most terrible times

When I was twenty six years old I broke my own heart. I broke up with a man I was very much in love with. We had been together for four years, and maybe I wasn’t ready to settle down, or the universe was calling so loud that I finally had to admit all the soft squishy cotton balls I’d used to plug my ears weren’t working. Earlier in the day of the day  I broke my own heart, I’d been on the train upstate, and I heard a voice. I was staring at the slate grey of the Hudson River in winter, the expanse of thick white sky, and I heard the voice; it said, you have to leave him and you have to do it today. I looked around, and saw nobody but a few quiet passengers. It wasn’t my voice, and I looked at the mountains; the voice had come from the mountains, and I just said out loud, okay. There were circumstances, obviously, aren’t there always circumstances? I sobbed and sobbed, and then I changed the direction of my life.

Are we fools to think the insides and the outsides are different places?

I remember going into work as a Maitre’D at the restaurant I worked at in the city for so many years, and the ghost like way I walked through the room; the way I could not cry, and so the tears covered me like the brush strokes of a Monet painting. And then one weekend I went upstate to my mother’s house, and I just didn’t go back to the city for months. I agreed to clean the attic while she was at work in the city; I have no idea what I told the restaurant. I was so heartbroken that on a drive that summer with two of my closest friends I started bawling to This Kiss by Faith Hill, like heaving crying on an errand in Kingston. First they laughed at me, and then one of them finally asked what had made me cry, and I said it was the line, It’s the way you love me.

Do our hearts have to break in order to become who we are meant to be?

And now when I look back at that summer upstate all I feel is a feeling kinda like joy, or maybe contentment; it makes my insides feel the way the ocean can feel on your skin as you bob and unbob in the velvet of water. I woke up to our dog Molly sticking her little nose in the door of my adolescent bedroom, and then jumping on the bed. I went downstairs to an empty Monday - Friday house and made coffee. I sat on the edge of the butcher block coffee table we’d had since I was a kid and I drank coffee and I watched The Ellen Degeneres show at it’s original 10am time slot.

I have had other moments like this, the memory of laying on the futon mattress in my tiny studio apartment in Hollywood in the months after my aunt died, and just watching the planes coming and going, wondering about the little tiny lives they held, people coming and going from some life and landing in another one. I had it in the drives home from graduate school after my father died suddenly, sitting in the silence and isolation of the 10 freeway, too scared to listen to music for fear that it would explode my hanging on heart. I had it on my travels after my mother died; in sitting in chairs around the world in sheer wonder and terror that she was dead, but I was apparently not. I have had it on front stoops smoking cigarettes in New York and Los Angeles, on floors of ICU waiting rooms when I finally made a fort like place to sleep for a few hours in the middle of sleepless nights.

Sometimes I think if I look back on my life these have turned into some of my dearest memories. I often wondered why until one day recently it just came to me, and this is what I think it is… That I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even fathom trying to fix myself; I was just there, and also my sad scared self was also there; I was forced into one piece by my pain. Did I want to feel better? Of course, but I was just so tired, so weighed down by this entry into a whole new universe that I did or did not ask for, like an air hockey puck hurled against the edges of living. I could not escape myself, and that was the gift.

Let me take a moment to talk about the brain. The brains that we woke up with today have evolved over five hundred millions of years. The brain has evolved from the Reptillian brain (the brainstem, the body, survival), to the Limbic Brain (feelings, memory, heart, connection), and then to the Neocortical brain (meaning making, order, logic, getting from here to there). I read something once that highlighted how as the brain evolved it did not integrate, but grew on top of itself, so like siblings at the same high school, the three parts tolerate each other, but they aren’t trying to hang out and get fro yo at lunch.

Isn’t that so interesting?? I think it’s so cool to start to understand this system that we live in our whole lives! Like when someone says drop from your head to your heart, they mean from neocortical thinking to the limbic landscape! We love to live in our head because it often feels the safest, it might be a little mean diva sometimes, but that’s only because it is obsessed with order. Sometimes it feels easier to force premature meaning on something than to feel how bad it actually feels in the heart, in the body, and that’s okay, but it leaves us out of balance, and that leaves us out of alignment with the universe, and then on and on the shit show goes.

The Neo Cortex is amazing if you have to get to the grocery store or take the subway from the West Village to Queens, but when you feel unbearable sensations in the body and it steps in to say, oh I  KNOW I KNOW you need to be fixed and then you won’t have any bad feelings!! You need this course, this weight loss program, this money, this partner, this, this, this will make it all better. It is the part that makes us think we are broken, and only if we are fixed will we be okay. It is the part that says you are here, but you need to get there; you are not enough here in this moment right now. But the present moment is where all the power and juice of life resides, so we sell ourselves short if we just keep trying to push ourselves forward!

The moment of power is always now, here, right in this exact moment, and now this one.

So there I was in upstate New York, in the heat of summer sitting on the coffee table we’d had since I was a kid, heartbroken, watching The Ellen Show in the space between what was no longer and what I did know yet. I call it the nothing space. Wayne Dyer said nowhere leads to now here. The nothing space is so scary because what if nothing ever happens, what if we never meet anyone and end up alone, or we can’t publish the book, or we never recover from the losses that stack up, what if our whole life is just this now, because isn’t that what it always feels like? Like every moment is forever.

So the question is, what is happening in this moment? What is happening in the other parts of the brain? What are you feeling? Limbic. What sensations do you notice in your body? Reptillian. Because another moment will come, that’s just how the earth turns and turns, the sun will come up again tomorrow, so far that is a guarantee. And then the BIG BIG question is can you be okay with the feelings and sensations that you notice? Can you just get yourself a cup of coffee and watch a little television show with any feeling that shows up. Can you witness yourself with tenderness? Can you stop trying for one second to change?

Of course there are things you can do that will help you to heal, of course there are actions to take, but there is also this, and this is often the part that we try to bulldoze over. This is often the part we try to get away from, but if you had a friend who bolted every time you had a tough time, you probably wouldn’t think of them as a great friend. Can you at least not bolt on yourself a little bit?

When we are sad it is not bad, and when we are happy it is not good; we came here to use every color crayon in the box. This is your life, so get drawing.

i love you,

Jen

Untitled Roses, William Eggleston