On Being with Life

…I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems
slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.

(excerpt from Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude)

Pacific storms continue to pound the Bay Area and beyond absolute wonder at how hail and summer heat can emerge simultaneously within the span of ten minutes, I’ve felt a respect for nature that has, at times, transcended words. Unlike humans, the rain hasn’t apologized for its intensity. The wind takes the space it needs to blow through. The sun shines and for a moment has the whole world shimmering in delight. Just for a moment. Soon, the hail arrives and knocks on the roofs of 100-year old Victorian buildings. It crinkle-crankles onto the morning runner’s bare arm, the cyclist’s sturdy helmet. It cracks car windows and knocks birds off branches and not once does it recoil at its magnificent power.   

Life is so magnificently powerful that allowing our very nature, the storms and the sun, to be exactly as they are can be truly terrifying. We want to control life when it doesn’t go our way and our thinking and feeling functions can get all out of whack as a result. We get hooked on blaming others or ourselves. We escape the storm and chase the sun through all sorts of addictions. We feign composure and optimism when underneath it all, we’re actually having a hard time. It’s just too scary to dip our toes into the unpredictable nature of life.

Here’s the thing. We cannot live life on the condition that the sun be present all the time and the storm be controlled. We are nature. We are wilderness in meat suits walking around as accountants and construction workers and therapists and I think this is part of our fundamental human struggle. How do we reconcile our intuitive, wild selves with our composed, cognitive ones? Both are features of this human experience and because we’re hard-wired to avoid suffering, we tend to over-index on composure and cognitive thinking because it can help us feel in control and less exposed to the spectacular power of a Pacific storm.

What if therapy, beyond offering the place to make important changes, was also about learning to be with these dimensions of life rather than change them? A place where we learn how to leave unsatisfying relationships but also stay. A place where we learn to leave unsatisfying jobs but also stay in them. A place to train the mind, body, and heart to surf the waves of life. The amazing, awful, then amazing again, ordinary, mundane, and routine features of life (thanks, LR Knost). 

I understand the controversy in these statements. Why am I suggesting we stay in unsatisfying relationships and jobs? Well…I am and I’m not. Leave the relationship or the job if it’s causing you an unacceptable amount of suffering. Definitely leave if there’s any sort of abuse present. Leave if you plain old just want to, life is seriously too short. However, learning to stay is also a skill. Long-term partnerships and regular jobs come with all sorts of disappointments and it can be just as useful an exercise to learn to be with suffering as it can to leave it. Remember that storms are a part of life, not always an indication of something gone wrong. We don’t try to change nature for doing its thing. We put rain jackets on, we stay inside, curl up with a bowl of soup and a book. When suffering shows up at our doorstep, does this always mean we need to change anything? 

I remember a teacher once say that mindfulness is the ability to be with and accept the present moment exactly as it is, and that suffering emerges when we want the present to be different. 

Suffering is a feature of life, just like rain is a feature of nature. Learning how to witness life’s weather patterns as they unfold is a bit of a key to this whole thing. Not to think it away, not to escape it nor drown in it, not to upend our every scaffold. Just being with it, taking care of ourselves, and appreciating, as Ross Gay writes, the “singing and shuddering”, the “screaming and reaching and dancing and crying”. 

Have you ever seen a lightning bolt rip through the night sky? Felt the wind hissing with cold and rocking the coastal oak from side to side? It’s beautiful.

Remember that with every second, it goes away. Why not embrace the mystery? Your frightening, magnificent life?