Fencing Bear at Prayer

We all want it, the big pay off.  The watershed that will make all of our problems go away.  We spend our lives convinced that if only I could win the jackpot, if only my book would become a best-seller, if only I could win that gold medal, then, then I would be on Easy Street.  And what happens when we get lucky and all our dreams come true?  As everyone who has been following the happiness studies knows, nothing.  We are typically right back where we started, more or less just as happy (or not) as we were to begin with.  Happiness, it seems, is indifferent to success. So why keep striving so hard?

I keep wanting to put my glasses on, but of course they don't work any more. I don't know how I feel about this right now. Stupid, for taking on an extensive healing process in the middle of the academic term. Self-pitying, for wishing for something to be better for myself and ending up worse off than I was before, at least temporarily. (At least, I hope is it temporarily. This healing process is very slow.) Angry, for not feeling radically different about my life even with my new vision. Melancholy, because I've changed everything I can think of to change and I'm still lost. Is this it yet, the dark night of the soul? How much darker is it going to get? How much more work can I do on myself and my life and still not be out of these dumps? Maybe I'm just stuck this way. Eeyore Forever. Maybe I'm not meant to be happy. Maybe trying to be happy is just an American disease. Maybe happiness is overrated. It's not fair, not to my family, who have...

Some things my sister learned during her yoga teacher training with Baron Baptiste: 1. Everything is okay, you are okay, there is nothing you need to be doing any differently. That is, don't spend all of your time thinking about things that you should be doing or wishing that you were doing or feeling like you are inadequate. What you are doing right now is fine. A.k.a. "loving what is." 2. Do what you love, love what you do. As an added bonus to being successful because you are doing what you love, you will find that if you do what you love, you will always have enough energy to do it because you will get energy from doing what you love. Also, what you love is what you are supposed to be doing (see #1). A.k.a. "follow your bliss." 3. Even if everybody knows these lessons already, it's worth repeating them over and over until they hear.

That's it, I quit. I am sick of living on the edge, always on the brink of failure. From now on, I'm only going to do things that I feel comfortable doing. Chicken of me, I know. But I just can't take it anymore, constantly judging myself inadequate, constantly looking over my shoulder at what I might be when I'm not. I'm a failure, fine. But I'm going to be a happy failure. I used to be pretty good at things, back in the day. I always finished my homework on time; I knew how to study for tests and make near perfect grades; I was a good student, really. And that wasn't all. I could swim and play the piano and read books and draw and bake cookies and arrange furniture and navigate for anyone who was driving. I felt, if not brilliant, at least competent, secure in the belief that given the opportunity, I would know what to do. But it's been a long time since I've felt that way, and I'm tired of it. I'm not really sure when it hap...

One of the more comforting things about confessing one's anxieties so publicly (or, given my current rate of hits, semi-publicly) as on a blog is that one almost immediately begins to wonder, having posted, whether things are quite as bad as they seem. Falling back on my usual habit, I started making a list in my head while I was doing footwork this afternoon, tallying blessings in my life against misfortunes and disappointments. My parents' divorce and my father's parents' deaths the same year loom large in the narrative of my childhood. The usual adolescent calamities and frustrations (being "fat", losing friends, falling in and out of love), my own divorce after three years of marriage in graduate school, my mother-in-law's death three months after my son (with my second, not my first husband) was born, having a skating rink built outside my office window while I was writing my first book (constant construction noise for over a year), being pillori...