Thoughts on Addiction to the Past, What it Feels Like to Be Alive, and a Benefit of Telling Your Story

I kept thinking I was on the wrong groove: I was a needle stuck in static, a train that was in danger of flying off the tracks. I lived with a body sense of not safe, not home, not okay. I thought I would write my way to okay, but I wrote about being not safe, not home, not okay, and so there I was—not safe, not home, not okay. 

What if instead of negotiating grooves, I flipped the record? What if instead of trying to find my place on the tracks, I realize I’m not a train and step off the speeding forward and find my legs and walk where I want?

What if I have been using almost all my energy to look backwards, to recreate the past in my mind so I can get it right?

When Australian Shepherd puppies are born, some breeders put tiny elastic bands around the root of the tail, and as the puppy grows, the tail, unfed, falls off. Now the dogs can herd sheep, cows, little kids, with less risk of injury. Nothing can step on their tail because they don’t have one.

What if writing your story, getting your past on paper so your brain can see your life in a way that feels coherent, what if this is also a way of putting an elastic band on the past, shriveling it, letting it fall away so you can focus on your present work with less chance of injury?

(But the tail belongs to the dog, you say. That is a brutal practice, you say. I believe you are right. But still, somehow, the story works for me here.)

What if you have been playing the song of your life, struggling with feeling at home, and you realize there’s a whole other side, a door B or C or F—a choice you didn’t know existed? What if you don’t have to struggle with the grooves of someone else’s song, someone who is somewhat like you but not really you? What if you can flip the record and dance the new dance? You don’t lose your past because you can’t--your body is your past—but you can lose your present and your future if everything in your mind is yesterday yesterday yesterday. 

The dog can go nowhere if the cow has its foot planted firmly on the dog’s tail.

You go and go and go—working so hard to do and be the right things and your body hurts and you are too tired to sleep (I am saying you, but you is I) and staying balanced on the tracks takes so much focus and energy. Even when you are sitting down with a glass of water, you are hurtling down the tracks and you hate all of it—the speed, the fear, the exhaustion, the confusion, the lack of passion, the inability to inhale without panicking. 

And then one day you realize you are not a locomotive and you step off the tracks and it’s like when you were a kid on the playground on the roundabout, hanging on to the metal handle while someone spun the whole thing faster and faster until you get so dizzy you forget to hold on, and you fly off into the dirt, and what started as fun made you sick. Only this time you realize you don’t even have to get on that thing. This time you walk to the sandbox by yourself and sit down and make a castle.

The thing about the heart is what feels like loneliness and anxiety may well be the feeling of being alive. Our hearts pull the world to us—our hearts reach out to the world—and if when you were born or when you were small you were not rooted in safety, your heart’s life force can feel like an endless fall; it can feel like a terrible ache, a call that something is dreadfully wrong. 

But if now we pay attention, what we can see is that this is what a wake life feels like: open, achy, borderless. 

Like really, really good sex. 

Our bodies are containers for our life. What if the size of our lives depends on how much we are willing to feel? What if my belief in the importance of happiness as a marker of a well-lived life leads me to run away from feeling the pulse of the moment? What if my belief in the happiness compass leads me sideways, away from truth, away from my heart’s true desires and from my heart’s connection to your heart?

Being alive can feel like a longing for more, and so we go to Whole Foods or Ace Hardware or Target when really curiousity just wanted to sit and watch the finches drink from the fountain, watch this moment and this moment and this moment and this moment. I have lived in the past for most of my adult life, and what I want to tell you is that I have found this moment is borderline unbearable. It’s like I’m a cup measure and somehow I am holding a quart. Living in the past is like lying on the couch and watching TV all day: you are both involved and in a coma. 

Sometimes that sounds like heaven. 

And sometimes, mostly, it doesn’t. 

It’s funny that my reluctance to hold, fear of holding, all the life my body can tolerate causes me to fill my arms with things I don’t really need: new scarves, a second bicycle, yet another bottle of essential oils.

Not allowing the body/mind to fully experience the moment is so expensive!

I watched a bird bathe in the fountain the other day. It was a spectacular show. He dipped his tail, his wings. He took a sip of water and threw his head back to swallow. He spun. Fluffed himself, shook.

I could have watched him all day.