This year wasn’t ideal.
Well, that doesn’t make sense. What would it take for an
entire year to be ideal? It’s one thing for a day to not be ideal. Perhaps you
wake up late (or too early), you forget you have to stop and get gas. Or the
first thing that happens when you get to work is chaos and you have to sort it
all out, tired, in want of coffee.
Or maybe you fight with your husband and your dog won’t
leave you alone even though you just took him out for a walk an hour ago (what
does he want?).
Probably your dog – and your spouse, for that matter – just
wants attention. The good kind of attention. The affectionate kind, where you
just spend time being with them. Maybe that’s all I need from myself. Maybe if
I had given myself enough attention this last year that would be all it would
have taken to make it ideal.
Paying attention takes patience. It takes the ability to put
down everything and not be completely irritated about it. And why should I be
irritated? Pretty much everything I do can wait a few minutes, an hour,
sometimes even days. I let my housekeeping go for days at a time so why not The
Amazing Race, especially when I am watching it on Hulu? The good part will
still be there in 15 minutes. Or tomorrow.
I started 2015 with Big Plans. I found out in January that
the major retail store that I managed was closing my location, which actually
coincided well with my Big Plan to move out of state with my husband to parts
of this country unknown. It was going to be an adventure after living 15 years in
Phoenix, Arizona, suffering six months of summer temperatures so that we could
enjoy the really lovely two or three months of ideal weather (there’s that word
again). After spending a year of living at my mother’s house to save money and
help afford us our adventure, we were finally going to be able to be on our own
again. Keep in mind that we are quite grown so while I truly appreciate the
time spent being close to my mom, I was really looking forward to having a
place of my own again.
Closing my store was difficult in the way, I think, that
teachers and parents experience sending their kids off to college or at least
to find a place in the world. It was also like having the wind knocked out of
you for some of my coworkers. A world turned upside down. Perhaps this is why I
am struggling with paying attention now. Everyone in my work life in the first
4 months of this year needed my attention. And maybe that’s why I created an
unhealthy mantra of “everybody wants something from me.”
That’s definitely not ideal.
I’ve tended to live my life propelled by what’s going to –
or might – happen next. Or rather what I anticipate is going to happen next,
and by that I mean that what happens next is going to be something great,
something better than what is happening right now. As a child, this was a
coping mechanism. As an adult, consciously or not, it has become a habit and an
excuse not to attend to the present. This is why having Big Plans propelled me
through the first half of 2015. I brought my store to a very satisfying close,
all pats on the back for a job well done. I extricated myself from deeply
unsatisfying and sometimes destructive relationships. I moved on, for there
were literally unseen landscapes ahead of me, a new life full of promise and
what I naively expected to be something akin to magic.
Some of it was magical. The verdant green of Tennessee
foliage and what I could only imagine (for I'd never seen any) were copses and thickets were
breathtaking as we drove I-40. North Carolina was our destination, a place we
had only just decided on a month before leaving the dry, monochromatic concrete
desert of Phoenix. Even as a California girl (both southern and northern), I
had never seen anything like the natural beauty of the Smoky Mountains.
We settled in Winston Salem (here I prefer to take license
and not use the “dash” which I have learned is a point of controversy to
locals; hence the name of the local minor league baseball team, The Winston
Salem Dash.). Potential still held thick here because of Winston Salem's history of culture
and arts; my husband, retired ballet dancer and teacher, had sent many a
student to the North Carolina School of the Arts here in Winston. Possibility
abounded.
And then reality set in. By that I mean that Big Plans or no,
we carry with us who we are, no matter where we go. I should know this by now;
I’ve started over at least four times over the last four decades (is it any
coincidence that I turned 45 this year?). This is not to say that our Big Plan
was for naught or that there is any regret in the choices we made. It’s just
that perhaps, finally, the lesson is that one should not put such great stock
into Big Plans.
Big Plans are great. They’re phenomenal. They can be life
changing. My Big Plans were life changing, literally, but not in the way that I
wanted my life to change.
I realize now that it was not my life that I wanted to
change; it was me. I wanted a miracle, but not just any miracle. I wanted a
miracle handed to me like the special red plate some families use on birthdays
- if you’re not familiar with this tradition, go ahead and look it up –
inscribed with instructions on how to use it. The miracle, that is, not the
birthday plate. Too many metaphors – let me get to my point.
My point. My point in writing this is that
2015 has ended on a rather disappointing note, compared to how it started, and
I’m okay with that now. Today, that is; I finally realized this today, December
31, 2015.
Today, I realized that I’m okay if I don’t know what’s going
to happen next week or in a month or two months or next year. Well, at least
today, I’m okay with that. Remember, I have a habit or two I need to work on
breaking; but my hope for 2016 is this: that I pay attention. I intend to pay
attention to today. Tomorrow I will pay attention to tomorrow. At this moment,
I am paying attention to the fact that my sweet puppy is sitting very closely
to me and resting his head against my elbow, tolerating the fact that I am
typing at the same time. I am paying attention to the fact that I have a job, I
have a roof over my head, food in my refrigerator and the best man I could ever
wish to have love me as my partner in all my Big Plans, even if they just end
up being "big plans" going forward.
As a child and an adult, I have always found stashed in my mom's bookcase a copy of Ram Dass’ book “Be Here Now.”
I’ve never read it although I have a vague understanding of what it’s about –
spirituality and yoga and meditation. For me, the title is enough. It’s another
way to say pay attention.
Be here now. That’s a way better mantra than my old one.
Good bye, 2015.
