Neither Here Nor There

Happy New Year!

It’s the year of the Earth Ox, as of 11:55pm PST. Clean your house NOW (no working on New Year’s Day, or you’ll be doing drudge work all year, so they say), then kick back and feast. Don’t forget oranges for prosperity, long pasta for a long life, and pussywillows for Spring.

Horoscope for the year, anyone? Try the url below.

http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/2009/2009Zodiac.htm

First “Unresolved,” now “Undecided.”  I seem to have hit upon a theme, here…

In fact, this post is harking back not to last week’s blog, but to what I put up the week before — to “Hummingbirds, By Request.”  I saw another hummingbird today, hovering high in the branches of one of our  oaks.  The bird wasn’t so much an inspiration to return to the topic of depression as a visual affirmation of my line of thought, an avian synchronicity, if you will; an external nod to a process of internal assessment (how am I doing in the depression department?) and a goddess-borne invitation to share the results.

I caught sight of the bird because I was outside.  I was outside because of that “pleasures” list.  Back in the day, back when the knees were working and I wasn’t lugging so much weight around, a happy abundance of time and money combined with a blithe disregard for vehicular carbon emissions and sent me tootling down to Marin multiple times a week to practice kung fu.  I loved it.  It fed my soul.  So, despite that I’m out of shape, despite that my back yard is a kind of painful place to be these days (in a low-ego place last spring, I allowed tree trimmers to hack off a whole huge branch of the most beautiful, most sacred oak on our property; I’ve been working on forgiving myself ever since, but I’m still racked with guilt and regret every time I go out there), I’m stepping outside daily to do a little tai chi.

And it’s helped.  No, it doesn’t carry me blithely through the day.  But it does give me a few peaceful moments under green leaves and wrapped in bird songs, a bit of breeze, maybe sunlight, maybe soft gray clouds.  Turns out that idea I had about settling for a few pleasant distractions (rather than aiming for out-and-out transformative bliss) is the right idea.  Pleasant distractions are what I need, and I get two-for-one by stepping out into the natural world and focusing on my breathing, my energy and my movements.

So, the pleasures list was a big deal.  The stuff that went on it didn’t make the difference.  The act of making it turned the tide.  Just doing something specifically for myself affected me positively.  Though there were scant few pleasures on the list, making it meant I was doing something that I hoped and intended to be good for me.  And so, it was.

What I’m doing for me now?  I’m refusing to let myself make major decisions about my life.  Oh, yes, I think I must.  I think these decisions are crucial, I think they’re pressing.  I think if I can just make the right choice, I’ll be able to head in the right direction and start feeling good about myself, my situation, my everything.

I haven’t gained tons of clarity from a bit of tai chi in the am.  But it has become ever so much clearer to me that I’m not thinking clearly.  Back when I was more lucid, I knew what kept me sane:  writing, music, exercise.  I knew that when I wasn’t singing — preferably on the page — it threw me off.  It made me weird.  It made me crazy.  Now, after 18 months of dream-deprivation… well, of course I’m not ok to drive!

I’m standing on tiptoe, gazing over the edge of middle-age into the vast silver-grayness of the future, looking for signposts.  But no matter what vistas delight or dismay my eye, I’m not going to choose a direction.  Not now.  Not yet.  I’m firmly undecided.

Well, I tried.  Been trying since 6 July 2008, post #1.  Tried again 11 January 2009, post #27, but, once again, the words I started with are gone, and new ones have taken their place.

I’ve been thinking about my next post all week, as usual.  As usual, I diddled around with the silly notion that I might actually start the post mid-week and get back to it later — that I’d actually get to edit and rewrite my thoughts for a change.  Like I said, a silly idea.  It was a week like any other; I handled my tasks, meetings, chores and small pleasures with typical organizational aplomb, packing them neatly into the available hours without a moment to spare.  Yesterday was devoted to Production Calendars, getting them finished and out of the way, so today’s decks would be clear for writing.

Yeah, but the morning’s email made it plain that at least one of the calendars wasn’t quite as finished as I’d hoped.  Leslie can’t make the early afternoon production meetings, so can I just reschedule them, please?  Right.  Just query the 14 members of the production staff and somehow determine if there’s an entirely different and consistent block of time that we all have free during the various weeks in question… oh, that’ll be easy.

Another email made me realize that we’d never quite decided if we were doing Load-In and Hang & Focus on Easter weekend or bumping up the tech deadlines and doing them a weekend earlier.  It’s not an issue I could table.  I wanted the calendar done, dusted and distributed before Winter Break; now it’s 3 days away from the next production meeting, and we still don’t have a schedule.  I sent out the query; I’m waiting for replies.

Next was the stressed-out phone call from one of my stage managers, the one who’s only managing a show so he can go to ACTF (a college-level theatre festival-competition) and vie for the grand Stage Management prize.  He’d have won it, too, hands down.  Only we — the Theatre Arts Department — screwed up.  I screwed up by not spending lots of time figuring out what needed to be done.  As the new kid on the block, I erroneously assumed that the people who’d been sending kids to this thing year after year after year knew how it was done and didn’t need my input.  But, apparently, we didn’t jump through the right hoops, didn’t put Ian on the right show, didn’t fill out the right forms at the right time, so he’s not eligible to compete.  I wrote and sent a “please, please will you grant him special dispensation” letter.  Won’t do any good, but the kid deserves at least that much from his stage management mentor, and I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror.

So, I wasn’t writing all day.  Wasn’t writing my stuff, anyway.  Come sundown, though, I was ready to go.  I had a topic and everything.  “Resolutions.”

The word has an oddly contradictory nature, as in resolution, a dissonant musical phrase resolving into harmony or fragmented conflicts melting into agreement (resolution as a process of distillation, breaking down complexity into its simple, constituent elements); or as in resolution, a firm declaration of purpose, determination, a promise, unshakeable intention and steadfast action.

I love words.  I meant to explore this one in the context of the resolutions I didn’t bother to make this year, in terms of the broader resolution I have made to spend this year open to new ways to resolve old problems, and from within an antiquated linguistic framework where New Year’s resolutions might be more a process of melting than gelling, more a matter of consonance than deliberation.

That was the idea for today, but when it came time, I didn’t have the time to do it right — to do that whole writing, word-play thing I enjoy so much.  I’m not a blogger.  The “blog” is not my literary genre of choice.  I like to look up the words I’m using and read what others have to say about them.  I like to rewrite what I’ve written until it’s got some lilt to it, and a bit of savvy, and it’s saying what I want it to say.  I like to write alone and in private — I don’t like people knowing I’m blogging right now, I don’t like writing with people in the room beyond waiting for me to finish blogging, even if they’re waiting to read my blog.  My writing process has become too public — though the results are barely so; a weekly missal to a few close friends.  I’m writing weekly, but I’m not writing what I want to write how I want to write it. 

And I can’t help but be jealous that my husband is.  He starts a piece and walks away, comes back and walks again, and doesn’t post it till it’s ready.  I can’t help but envy my blogging son who has no desire to scrub-brush his work, but gets all the writing satisfaction he needs by posting some real words in real time.

Silence in the room beyond… the movie’s over.  Time to post real words in real time.  No schnazzy ending, no pithy wrap-up.  No resolution.

Janet and I were discussing happiness.  I was talking about something that had escaped me, but that I longed to recapture.  She was talking about a fiction, a fantasy, a construct in which she placed no credence.

Time was short; we left lots unsaid.  She urged me to write about it, and post it here.

I’m not a likely author for a piece on happiness.  I’m not a particularly happy person, for one thing.  Not as a rule, not in the moment.  For another, there have been volumes written on the subject already, much of it by people far more light-hearted and enlightened than I.  (Bobby McFerrin and the Dalai Lama spring to mind… well, to my mind, anyway.)  So, this isn’t a “how-to” guide to the Blissful Life.  I can’t draw a map to show how to get there.  I don’t have the key to the Happy Kingdom in my pocket.  Or maybe I do.  Maybe we all do, but unless and until we realize that the brick walls in front of us are doors, the keys are no good to us.

I’ve often said and always believed that reality is a function of perspective.  I believe it still, but that doesn’t mean I can will myself from depression to happiness.  Depression isn’t a point of view.  It’s an illness that presents as a point of view.  A radically warped point of view.  Another thing depression isn’t, is circumstantial.  It’s so irresistibly logical to think, if I could change jobs, fix my house, improve my financial situation, get well, whatever, I’d be fine.  But it isn’t so.  Happiness isn’t contingent on the people or the conditions around us.  The good life doesn’t guarantee happiness; bad luck doesn’t necessarily destroy it.

Maybe it didn’t banish the darkness and call in the light, but realizing that depression is genetic and biochemical and that my moods operate independent of sucky circumstances was… well, it was helpful.  It meant that whether or not things get better, I’ll get better, sooner or later.

Better sooner.  I’m doing what I can to speed things along.

-         I’m challenging my negative thinking

When we’re depressed, our thoughts are not our friends.  We can’t trust ‘em.  We think we’re thinking clearly, but we’re not.  We confuse our depressed thoughts about reality with reality.  We confuse what we think with who we are.  We forget that thinking is just something we do, an activity.  When I find myself weeping over the past or staring into the black hole of the future in terror, I try to call a halt to the whole thinking thing and bring myself back to the moment — which is never as awful as the mis-remembered past or the dreaded future I’ve been dwelling on.  I remind myself that my thoughts aren’t too reliable and do my best to ignore them.  To quiet them.  Happiness is born of a still mind.

-         I’ve started a “pleasures” list.

First try, I only came up with two pleasures, and one of them wasn’t remotely possible.  But I’ve added to the list since then, and I make sure I get in at least one “pleasure” each day.  Several are distractions, rather than pleasures; I’ll settle for a pleasant distraction for now and worry about focussed serenity later.  The simple pleasures are the easiest to manifest on a daily basis, like A Nice Cup of Tea.  Some of my “pleasures” are things that used to work for me, but no longer do the trick.  I engage in them anyway.  I tell myself, “I’m not getting much from this right now, but if I keep doing the things I once enjoyed, I’ll start taking pleasure in them again, someday.”

That’s it.  Start small, dream big.

During the too-brief conversation that sparked this post, a twangy, chirpy, remarkably persistent hummingbird insisted on adding her/his opinion.  It took a while to spot the tiny creature, but Janet eventually spied it high in the spindly tree branches above us.  Lest I imagine the omen was for her alone, a second hummingbird — another variety altogether — alit in the branches, as well.  The dark newcomer flashed a few hot-pink feathers, then the two birds flew off in different directions.

Hummingbirds are messengers of the Gods, travellers between worlds, beings who help keep nature and spirit in balance.  The Cochti tell this story:

Long, long ago, the people lost faith in the Great Mother.  In anger, She held back the rain for four years.  The people suffered greatly, as did all the creatures of the earth, except for one — Hummingbird.  Hummingbird did not thirst, but thrived, despite the drought.  Through their arts and magic, the shamans learned that Hummingbird knew a secret passageway to the underworld, where he would fly to gather honey.  Further study revealed to the shamans that this doorway was open to Hummingbird alone, because Hummingbird had never lost faith in the Great Mother.  Hummingbird’s faith inspired the people to regain their own.  When their faith was restored, the Great Mother smiled, and took care of them once again.