Meditations

Yesterday I was looking at a the copyright page of Dance Dance Dance and under “Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data,” I saw “Murakami, Hakuri, 1949— ” . The “1949— ” gave me a small panic attack. I couldn’t breath right. I couldn’t think straight. The palms of my hands were sweating. (It didn’t help that I was on a plane and we were taking off. I’m always afraid of plane take-offs.)

1949— : Murakami, Hakuri is still alive, but he will die. We don’t know when, but his death is so certain that we put a long dash and left a space after his birth year. And when he dies, we will add the year of death, and the information will be complete. Our job will be done.

We don’t have shelf space for aging, death, and dying. They are so unfashionable. But small signs remind us that deep inside we know the truth. Journalists write obituaries when people are still alive. We make wills. And yet we maintain the illusion that what is true for everybody else will not be true for us. That, as Christopher Hitchens says, God in our case will make an exception. It’s not surprising. The experience of the end, as the experience of the beginning, is something we don’t know anything about.

When it comes to human experience, I have a graphic and unstoppable imagination. When somebody dies, especially if they die in frightening circumstances, I cannot stop myself from imagining how it must have felt. I can feel their fear, hear their screams, think their thoughts, even sense a shadow of their pain in my body. An extreme form of empathy, I suppose.

But this is still experience of living. The final, scary, moments of life. I cannot go beyond the wall of an experience that is no longer life, no longer human.

An interesting situation, if you think about it. We are trapped in this interval between a beginning and an end we don’t know anything about. The end is particularly mysterious. The end is unthinkable. We don’t know when it’s going to come. We don’t know how it’s going to come. We don’t know what will happen (or not happen) thereafter. Yet it belongs to our history and the history of all the people we know.

These past days, I’ve been wondering what is that holds me back. I have ideas, I have plans and desires, I have dreams. And yet, it seems that I spend most of my time distracting myself and wasting time.

Then, yesterday, riding the train to the city, I put the book I was reading down for a moment (Carol Shields’s Collected stories, just at the beginning of Mrs. Turner cutting the grass) and I turned my head. There she was. My guilt was looking at me from behind, watching my every move.

She was silent, but clearly questioning my trip to the city. “Stop looking at me that way, I need that backpack that can hold my laptop and my camera,” I said. “No, you don’t. All the bags you have are perfectly fine.” I perceived what she was really saying: “You don’t deserve it.” You don’t deserve to travel with your computer and your camera. You don’t deserve to do what you like. You don’t deserve to have dreams.

(Who is she? As much as I strain my neck, I can never make her face up. She is always behind me.) “Just wait a little longer,” she told me in silence. “All will end and you won’t have anything to worry about. All the angst about what to do with your life will be behind you. As a matter of fact, it’s already behind you. it’s already too late.”

I suspect she has been with me for a long time. Perhaps from the beginning, before I could speak and even before I learned there was a world outside of myself. She’s followed me in all my moves from one place to the next, as I left behind family, friends, lovers, homes, pets, and possessions. She is the one that has always suggested me to wait and to ask for permission before trying: “Perhaps you need to ask around, just to make sure that you are not deluding yourself. You know, I just don’t want you to fail and get hurt.”

Perhaps you too have your guilt following you all the times. It’s easy to know when she is there. You can feel her breathing behind you and you are surprised every time a police car goes by without stopping you.

But why?

* * * * *

For some reason, she grew up believing that preserving things was better than using them. She learned how to save energy and stuff. Her mother told her periodically of a box of chocolate she received when she was a child. She loved chocolate with a passion and yet she exercised great constrain and disciplined herself to eat not more than a piece of chocolate a week until the chocolate became white and stale and had to been thrown away.

She behaved as she expected to lose everything she had at any moment; as if nothing was to be taken for granted. It’s strange, because her family was never that poor or economically unstable. Her family wasn’t very rich, but always in good enough shape, even at the beginning, where her dad was earning little money, was still looking for a stable job, and they owned a tiny white Fiat 500.

She never had to skip a meal, although she remembered that one time when she stumbled walking from the kitchen to the dining room and dropped a plate of penne pasta on the floor. It wasn’t her fault but her father got really angry at her. The plate must have not been broken, because he ordered her to pick up every single penna from the marble floor and put then back in the plate. “This is your dinner,” he said. (It’s possible that her mother had complained, with no result. It’s unlikely, though; when it came to disputes with the children, her mother would take a break from arguing with her husband and take his side).

Perhaps, her psychotherapist suggested, she did lack something. Love, recognition, understanding, safety. Safety. That would explain it, wouldn’t it? Even if she had enough to eat today, she didn’t feel it was safe to expect that she would in the future. Perhaps her family would split, or her mother would send her away as she did when her sister was born, or her parents would die.

At that time she was probably 7 or 8 years old. When her parents were out she would start imagining what would happen to her if they had an accident and died. She would probably move with her grandmother. What would she bring with her? How would her grandma know? Luckily, she knew where to find her phone number. Grandma it’s a long ways away. She would have to take the train. Where would she find the money? And how would she get to the station? Could she find something to eat? How long would she able to survive?

Making plans. Preserving energy. Be prepared. She always traveled with a backpack that would have enough to survive for a week. Several pens and paper—that was essential. Some money, a book, phone numbers, keys. The case for her contact lenses, in case she had to spend the night out. You never know. You can never be too prepared.

One of my first blog exchanges was with with Jory Des Jardin discussing how women’s heads (or at least our heads) seemed continuously busy in an inner dialog about what’s going on, what we should or should not do, what’s right and what’s wrong.

Often, these annoying inner voices are talking about us. Like in those embarrassing situations in which a group of people talk in third person about somebody who is in the room, our voices discuss our performance, appearance, or an inappropriate comment we just made. Sometimes it’s just one loud voice, either disappointed with us, angry with somebody else, or sweet talking us out of taking a responsibility or achieving a goal.

It’s not always bad, though. A few years ago, I was going to a doctor appointment by subway. I was worried about the results of a medical test and I was trying to distract myself looking at the few passengers on the train. Suddenly, somebody was with me. Not a real person, but a real presence. She looked at me smiling and she told me not to worry, that everything would be OK. And she was right. It turned out that everything was OK.

At that time I was reading a lot about Kwan Yin, so I felt that she was a Kwan Yin kind of presence, loving and compassionate—she who hears the the cries of the world—who was reassuring me.

It was a strange experience. I’m a secular person. I was raised catholic in a country were saints routinely talk to people, but no saint ever talked to me before. I am into Buddhism, which is a non-theistic religion, and rather into the godless Zen version than the god-full tibetan version. Yet, that day somebody sat with me on the train, smiled, and told me that everything would be OK.

Of course the most likely and skeptical interpretation is that it was just me. If it was, it was a very different me than the voices in my head that I usually have to listen to, day in and day out.

Yesterday, I had another unusual aural experience. I was climbing a very steep hill on my bike, a stretch of road that only rarely I can climb without dismounting my bike. And I heard this voice, out of the blue, saying: “You can do it.”

Now, my usual voices would have said something like: “I think this is enough, maybe you want to get off your bike before you fall down or have a heart attack.” But this voice, firm yet supportive, just said “You can do it.” And guess what, I did it.

I feel that I’m still with the after effects of that experience. It’s a sweet supportive feeling that makes me feel good, gives me permission to love myself, and believes that I can do it.

My familiar bickering voices mean well, in their own ways. They are there to act out my fear of failure. Debating forever what’s right and what’s wrong provides me with endless justifications for all my actions. It’s hard for me to deal with the idea that I failed and it was my fault. I’d rather drown any perception of failure with the thousand reasons why I made a certain choice. Perhaps my choice was wrong, but I was right to make it.

Deep inside, I know it would work much better to take a little bit of time to weight the options, consult with others, do what I think it’s best, and learn how to apologize if it turns out that my decision what not the right one. Because in the end, all that debating doesn’t seem to produce better decisions, just better justifications.

But these other voices, the good ones, the loving ones, the supportive ones, the voices who believe I can do it, those I don’t yet recognize as part of myself. They talk to me with a different voice, one that I’ve missed for a long, long time.

Andrew Hinton writes a thoughtful and passionate post about George Bush’s first veto that will prevent the use of frozen embryos for stem cell research. In his post, Andrew questions where life starts, where life ends, and who decides it.

He also touches on the issue that I find the hardest to digest about this so-called culture of life:

This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.

What does culture of life means for an administration that is perfectly fine with capital punishment, has started two wars, and at the present doesn’t seem particularly compelled to stop the killing of civilians (including children) in Lebanon? Why is the life of a fully formed human being worth less than that of a frozen embryo? Why is the concept of life so much more valuable than the reality of life?

It’s true, the practice of life is much less pure, innocent, and holy than the abstract concept of life. Real people live real lives, make mistakes, do stupid things, hurt, humiliate, threaten, and sometimes kill other people. Real people, differently from frozen embryos, do not symbolize the appealing concept of eternal life; they are born, grow up, get old, and die. They don’t represent the purity of the concept of life; they sweat, bleed, shit, smell bad, and get fat. Real life is a continuous dance with real death; growth is the other face of decay.

But real people also love, nurture, and protect other human beings. They are loved, nurtured, protected by other human beings. They miss other humans beings and they need closeness and physical contact. They are part of a net of relationships, human connections, and social exchanges. They line up in a temporal sequence of births and deaths for generations and generations and hold the memories of those who came before them.

Whatever philosophical reasoning or ethical believe we hold, we cannot dismiss the smelly, bloody, sweaty, and infinitely endearing nature of our messy life. This is the life that a frozen embryo, sadly, has never experienced and almost certainly never will. This is the life that we can and must protect.

Today I ate my lunch outside. It was a warm, breezy spring day, one of these perfect days that we experience rarely in a year. The sky was blue, the trees full of white and pink flowers, the air felt and smelled sweet, and the breeze was just cold enough to make me appreciate the warmth of the sun.

It occurred to me that about 30 years ago I was having the same identical experience. I was in high school in Rome and that spring day I decided to eat lunch with a few friends in park. I was so much younger, I lived in a different city in a different country in a different continent. The world around me was different and I had different dreams and concerns. For all intents and purposes, I was a different person.

Yet the feeling of calm—as if time had suddenly slowed down and almost stopped—and awe at the beauty of that particular moment were the same. Perhaps there are feelings that don’t belong to us and cut through time and space, and are just there to be felt. Perhaps enlightenment is when we can quiet everything else inside us and outside of us and just be inside these unchanging experiences that are just there waiting for us to notice.