Post-It Note Possessions

One of my best friends is doing her MFT (Masters of Family Therapy) and she told me about an interesting exercise they did in class the other day. Her professor gave them all color coded post-it notes and they had to write their top 5 stuff on them. They had five post-it notes for their top five people, another their top five activities, possessions, etc. Then he asked them to start eliminating a few of those things (1 from people, 2 from possessions, etc.). Then he started coming around the room and randomly taking post-it notes from people's desks. From some people's desks, he took all but a few of their post-it notes, some he took none.

Needless to say, it was a rather intense experience. Not only were you asked to think of your top five people (ouch!), you had to quantify your life in a very specific way. Then you were helpless as those things are taken away as you watch other people unscathed by the wrathful power of God. Clearly, this exercise mirrors life and asks you to experience loss in a particular way, probably giving different people a sense of relief, jealousy, anger, detachment, etc. And all the while you realize that they are post-it notes, they're little pieces of colored paper which have little resemblance to the real thing.

This made think, however, about the meaning that we imbue on all kinds of things. This from the girl who still has most of her undergraduate papers and three years worth of Wine Spectator tucked away in the closet. For a while, I told myself that my graduate work might necessitate that I refer back to my undergraduate papers (because I must've been so amazing a researcher that there's gems in there for me to borrow?). Then I piled a bunch of sheets and towels on top of them and pretended that they were serving as a linen shelf. Better than having them sit in the very bottom of the closet, right?

It's now been a full ten years since I've graduated and I've never opened those boxes except to look at what they were when I moved the last time. It's true that I haven't really had a reason to get rid of them. They're perfectly fine where they are even though they take up quite a bit of space. But it's also true that I've attached a whole mess of personal identity onto those papers. They represent the self-searching me who discovered gender and race theory, of the girl who went from a pretty typical Asian American SoCal girl with hair down to the elbow to one who was politically active, who had tattoos, piercings and was into the performing arts. In those papers are the first semblance of the seeker that I would become. My belief that the world could become a better place, that there is personal agency and possibility for some sort of social utopia, that's all squished together in a couple of file boxes underneath those sheets and towels.

And now I'm thinking that it's time to throw them away. The thought of it makes me wince. Because detachment is hard, and giving up anything that has served you for so long is hard. And it means that I'm admitting that she's gone, the person that I was when I first begin to discover myself has moved into the past, only to live in the memories of my friends and family. Moving forward is difficult and letting go is excruciating. I suppose that hanging onto the past is even harder, since it no longer exists.

One of my yoga teachers told me last week that getting rid of stuff only hurts when you're doing it, once you do it, you're given a sense of enormous relief, of spaciousness, of weight being lifted off your shoulders. There may be grief, since all loss, no matter how minuscule, is matched with grief and sadness. But once that's finished, there will be room for the present. And we all need plenty of room for the present because there is so much waiting to fill our hearts and minds.

So I'm going to do it, I'm going to take those file boxes and recycle them. Maybe they'll be made into other things: paper towels to wipe up a mess, or a paper bag to carry someone's groceries, or another cardboard box to hold the identity of someone else.

My Surreal LIfe

"Can you ladies help me?" she cried.

She was wearing pajamas, and a felted overcoat, and slipper shoes. Her hair was a mess, she held a plastic bag of squishy stuff in one hand and a pillow in the other. She was crying hysterically. My first thought was that she was homeless. But then I realized that I was standing in a hospital parking lot desperately sucking on a cigarette with a caretaker who was on a break. Maybe she'd broken out of the psyche ward.

She needed a ride to her doctor's office, which was a few blocks away, because the Emergency Room where she'd been waiting for four hours had somehow messed up her in-take and she'd been in a horrible car accident several days before and her son and daughter-in-law had dropped her off and gone back to Big Bear and she had possible fractures to her cervical vertebrae and several hematomas on her legs. What?! Neither of us had access to a car and she didn't like any of our other suggestions. She started walking away and the caretaker and I looked at each other and started feeling terrible. We looked at her limping through the rain and both reluctantly tried to think of what to do. Then we saw her pick up her cell phone and next thing we knew, she told us that her doctor would meet her back at the Emergency waiting room. She just needed help getting there.

So the caretaker and I took her things, each held one arm, and helped her through the pouring rain and into the Emergency Room. I gave her my hand, which she took hungrily, and helped her into a chair. I looked her in the eye and told her that it was going to be okay. I held onto her hand as she told us a garbled story about a car accident on a curvy mountain road and thinking that she was going to die. I noticed a rather large triple diamond wedding ring. She showed us a gigantic swollen knarly mess of an upper thigh and I started to believe her story a little. It didn't matter at that point whether or not her story was true anyway, I believed that she was in pain and needed me to sit there and hold her hand. She kept calling us "angels" and saying that her doctor would be right there.

It really wasn't that long until her doctor wandered in,maybe twenty minutes, but each moment seemed so full, it felt like hours. The lady pointed her out and I ran over to get her. The doctor didn't seem so enthused or even very concerned about her. The caretaker and I called out "good luck" and "good bye" and walked back to our little sheltered space beneath the parking garage. We lit up another pair of cigarettes and each took long drags. We chatted as if we were friends. We finished our smokes down to the filters. Then we walked slowly back into the hospital and back to our lives.

Is the universe mysterious or are we just dumb?

So it's ridiculous to actually believe that bad things always happens in three's. Besides the fact that it's not possible to prove other than with some anecdotal evidence, in the absolute, it's difficult to really classify things as good or bad. Things just happen and they may seem bad at the time, but ultimately, it's simply what happened.

I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about the way that the world works and considering whether or not there's a plan for us. Not really in a "predetermination" sort of way (I really can't swallow that my life has already been written somewhere like a crappy Indy dark comedy) but simply that the universe is constantly coming together around me in a way that has pushed my life towards a certain path, and that it will continue to do so. I am going to go right out there and say that releasing the control that I've always hoarded for myself has been liberating. And rather than leading to inaction, it's led to me move with more clarity through my life. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that I have things figured out, quite the opposite; it's just that I don't need to figure it all out, it's all coming and my job is just to receive it. To be truly open to opportunity, love and life is a really hard thing. I'm just trying to get out of my own way.

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape: and the Path to Loving-Kindness, " Life's work is to wake up, to let things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will." Maybe it's the nature of people, but I've found that lessons almost always come with "bad" things. When things are good, when we're comfortable and nestled deep in our cubby holes, there is very little learned. It's only when we venture out into the unknown, the dark place, meet our shadow or stand at the edge of our abyss that we're forced to confront ourselves, and realize that we didn't know a thing at all.

One, two, three, always in a row. Maybe it's because we're looking for it, or because it's the natural rhythm of the universe, or because we've smoked too much crack, but it sure feels like when you've experienced two difficult situations, there's a third to come. Otherwise, you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop (damn it, I actually said that to someone the other day).

I think it's just because three is all I can take, because if there were more, I'd keel over with the weight of it. I'd have to crawl underneath the covers and actually never come out again. But for now, I feel pretty safe, I think the universe knows that I've confronted more dark spaces in the last little while than I have in a very very long time. I've teetered on the brink and not fallen in. Thank you, lesson learned.