Don’t you just hate it when one of your friends gets involved and then consumed with something — whatever it is, yoga or veganism or drinking — and then that’s all she can talk about? And she’s always pushing it on you, too? Don’t you just hate that? My friends and family are pretty good about it, explaining their new passionate interests and encouraging me (except for the drinking, none of us are drinkers) but not going on and on and on in an annoying way, but I have casually known people like that.

And so here I am, a new True Believer, and hope I am not annoying. I’m still a knitter and a baker, a reader and a writer, a mother and wife and friend. I’m still clunky and mindless, and go into thrashing mode more often than I’d like. I still get into an eating frenzy sometimes and hate myself for it afterwards. I still just want a pint of ice cream when the world comes at me a little too hard. I’m still grappling with a difficult life situation squarely in the middle of everything. I’m still all of that, and much more — some I’d admit to you over a glass of wine, some I admit to myself only in the dark, and some I won’t even admit then.

it's SO elementary: Look. See.

But baby, I’m trying. I’m trying so hard, and my old way of trying is the wrong way — the clench my fists, scrunch my shoulders up near my ears, squint my eyes and clench my jaw, and do. it way. That way is antithetical to what I’m trying now, and it’s so hard, but it’s so good. In the first week of my 40-day project, I have not succeeded many more minutes than I have succeeded, but the effort and the willingness to try has had a huge effect on me. Huge. (‘uge, if you’re Donald Trump. I’m not, so huge.) Because it is doing such powerful things for me, and because you are part of my world, I want to share the thing with you, in case it grabs you, in case you need it too.

I read this yesterday in Coming To Our Senses (Jon Kabat-Zinn), a book I keep mentioning and recommending. The chapter opens with a fragment of Yeats’ brilliant poem Sailing to Byzantium:  ”Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is, . . . ”  Kabat-Zinn writes:

…virtually everybody has to some degree or other whispered longings from deep within the psyche, a secret life really, a life full of dreams and possibilities we usually keep hidden. The sad thing is, we usually keep it hidden from ourselves too. We suffer greatly as a consequence. The secret is sustained often for the whole of our lives with no inkling that we are complicit in a self-deception that can be severely life-eroding and self-destructive.

The real secret? That we really do not know who or what we are, for all the surface preoccupations, pretensions, and the inward and outward posturing we construct and hide behind to keep ourselves and everybody else in the dark.

My attention was captured by the beginning of that passage, the part about whispered longings. Don’t you secretly feel that you are so much more than you are allowing yourself to be, or to know? This reminds of the poem Our Deepest Fear by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Of course that idea doesn’t have to exist solely in the framework of God, or of any particular God, though it is clearly a spiritual framework connecting to something larger than our small selves. I first read a snippet of that poem in Woodstock, handpainted artfully on a piece of (probably handwoven) linen, and I started crying. I think we all (or most of us, anyway) share this sense of something greater in us than the one who talks to friends, does the shopping and cleaning, pursues hobbies, travels, loves, hates, tries, succeeds, fails. Kabat-Zinn goes on:

Isn’t it time for us to discover that we are already larger than we allow ourselves to know? Isn’t it time for us to discover that it is possible to inhabit that larger knowing and perhaps free ourselves from the deep anguish of our persistent habit of ignoring what is most important? I would argue that it is long past time, and that now is also the perfect time.

I am so surprised by the real effect of trying to meditate, trying to be mindful. I can’t sustain it for 3 minutes, and my effort to eat mindfully lasts for about the first third of the meal and then suddenly my plate is clean and I don’t know how that happened. But the trying is amazing. Two fundamental things have happened after the first week: 1) I’ve learned that my thoughts are most often either in the future or in someone else’s head, and 2) I’ve learned how quickly I rewrite what’s happening so I don’t have to know what’s actually happening. MAN. Look at everything I’m missing!

In the coming week, my project is going to expand into my body; I want to get back to my kettlebell, and I want to do some yoga. My body is part of the deal, and reconnecting to it as it actually is is important. I have to work out the details, so that’ll be presented in tomorrow’s post, in case you are interested in taking any piece of the project for yourself.

Happy Sunday y’all! I’m getting offline now and enjoying another beautiful warm winter day in NYC.