On Seeing Clearly

I’ve been thinking about windshield wipers lately, in no small part because nephew Edbear got "The Wheels on the Bus” stuck in my head. It’s currently the # 1 hit in Edbearsville, especially the wipers-on-the-bus part. Each rendition he sings (and he is generous with the renditions), begins and ends with that verse, with special emphasis on the "Swish swish swish”.

And frankly I think it’s time wipers got their day. I was reminded of their great utility while driving in the recent snows here. They are the unsung heroes of inclement weather. You don’t have to think about it, but dependably, as raindrops plop, the wipers clear. Yet without them how far could you really get? I remember vividly from childhood the time the driver’s side wiper of my parents’ car gave out during a thunderous storm, my dad driving with his head hanging out the the driver’s side window, getting soaked to the shoulders.

What I’ve been thinking is that sometimes life itself could use a good wipe. I walk around in a haze so much of the time, running from one thing to the next, trying to see between splotches and streaks on the windshield, a continual to-do list falling like fat raindrops from the sky and scattering across my field of vision.

But every now and again I’m aware of a feeling of clearness, like my feet are planted firmly on the ground and I’m awake, I see and understand the road ahead. When I am, however briefly, smarter than my everyday self. I’m all: yes, I am one with the universe! I understand the deep yin and yang of it all! I hold within me with great delicacy all the paradox and pain and deep goodness of the fragile and tantalizingly brief moments we spend spinning around on this precious blue marble! I become like Walt Whitman: all this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well. Her Wiseness Anne Lamott has described this feeling as a veil lifting.

I try to interpolate the graph, to understand which things I do (or stop doing) that lead to this feeling of calmness and solidity.

Sitting for a while with my thoughts helps. It doesn't really help while I’m sitting – a few beats after I close my eyes and tune in to my breath like you’re supposed to, I become privy to the deafening cyclone that is the inside of my brain. The whole operation sounds a lot like these cartoon viking kittens plundering the seas to Led Zeppelin, if the sound were piped through subwoofers and garbled with static and scattered sentence fragments and loops of conversations in which my part of the dialogue becomes increasingly witty and self-righteous with each repeat.

Sometimes I wonder how I manage to function at all.

The clarity part usually happens when I open my eyes and realize I’m back where I began, and the room is stunningly silent and still compared to the white water rapids I’ve been cruising down in my mind.

And the afterglow from that is that I tend to feel a little less like an unstable isotope, always whipping my electrons around me at maximum speed, unable to land anywhere to rest happily, slowly decaying into other things. I feel a little more like I live inside my body, and my body doesn’t stretch a block before and after my mind like it usually does. It’s like in the cartoon Peter Pan when he finally catches that hyperactive shadow and reattaches it to himself, where it belongs. It feels like I turned the windshield wipers on.

Another thing that helps me turn the wipers on is remembering a phrase I read in a book by Charlotte Kasl: what is, is. Here's what she says about it:

It helped me accept the moment and stop fighting with myself...It’s just what is. It’s the truth, it’s where my life is right this moment. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just what’s happening at the moment. Saying what is, is helps us stop demanding that situations and people be different. It also allows us to drop into our feelings, which connects us to our inner wisdom.

It’s kind of a reality check. It helps you identify and accept whatever’s going on in your life at that very moment. It puts the horrible and the sublime in perspective. Keeps you from sensationalizing. Helps you get a firmer grasp on reality.

Our eyes are flawed and we forget to see with them. It’s nice to put on a pair of glasses now and then, and see the sharpness and detail you’ve been missing. It's nice to get the high-def channels once in a while.

The V Stands for Ambivalence

Ah, Ballentimes Day. It seems that a blog that so heavy-handedly purports to cover the topic of love might make a mention of this excruciating holiday. So here it is: it sucks. (In the interest of full disclosure I will mention that my valentine, Spangles, is far away on official business and won't be back until late, thereby spending all but 12 minutes of the day elsewhere from me. Not that something like that would ever influence my completely unbiased and impartial reporting.)

Single or attached, this is the holiday-cum-months-long-card-selling-ploy in which "they" try to stuff your highly individual and boundless love into a small, heart-shaped chocolate mold. In which love is colored red and pink and festooned with doilies. In which love is equated with buying useless clutter and delicious but fattening bonbons, not to mention, if you are unlucky enough to be a twenty-something woman who reads fashion magazines, frilly underwear. (If you are attached, editors will include this directive with their instructions on "6 Sexy Ways to Rev His Love Engine"; if you are single they will categorize this advice under the aegis of "treating yourself". Either way, heeding this advice is a lose-lose because in both cases you end up with frills wedged between your butt cheeks. My advice: take the underwear money and invest in something that will improve your quality of life, like jammies. Or IHOP.)

For many years, my preparation for Valentine's Day has involved bunkering down to survive the onslaught of reminders that you don't have a boyfriend and it's probably because of some fundamental personality flaw that everyone's aware of but you. I tend to make Valentine's Day, and a lot of other things, either black or white: either you have a mushy, romantic evening with your one true love who showers you with presents and adoration, or you drink late into the night- in the company of a group of other desperate, bitter singletons, if you're lucky.

But anecdotal evidence suggests, as usual, that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Last year, I had a sweetheart and we went to a monster truck rally, then walked the several miles up Broad St. back to my apartment. The monster truck rally was, well, let's just say there's probably a reason their primary audience is nine-year-old boys. And the walk back was lovely and sweet, but no more or less so than other lovely and sweet things that Spangles and I have done. The year before that, when I was single, I went to Copabanana and had nachos and margaritas with a friend and her friends, who all turned out to be very nice and funny, and we got free promotional tank tops for Absolut vodka! Then one year in college I participated in "V-day," which promotes awareness to end violence against women and girls (which I wholeheartedly support) by getting on stage and using a lot of different words for "vagina" (which, to be honest, I felt weird about.)

So anyway, you can't entirely blame Valentine's Day. It's not the holiday's fault if we choose to think that its fullest expression can only be achieved by young couples who are passionately in love going to dinner in a fancy restaurant. Maybe I even feel sorry for Valentine's Day and all the venom it's been subjected to over the years, all the parties that have been thrown for the purpose of cursing its existence. Maybe people like me are to blame for distorting it into this crazed, candy-gobbling, black-or-white Holiday of Judgment of Self and Others.

After all, it usually turns out to be just another day in the life. So why not use it as a chance to take a look at the people in our lives we love best, be grateful for them, and find a way to make them feel special. Not in an icky way, but in a way that reflects our unique brand of awesomeness. And let's not leave out receiving love, either. Let's rejoice and be glad at being loved by one or many, when we can, while we can.

So let us close, on this long-suffering and long-suffered holiday, with words from Her Wiseness Elisabeth Kubler Ross and co-author David Kessler:

Our lessons in love come in all forms, from all kinds of people and situations. It doesn't matter who we are, what we do, how much money we make, whom we know. We can all love and be loved. We can be there, we can open our hearts to the love around us as we give love back, determined not to miss the great gift.

**PS: I just heard from Spangles - he's catching an earlier flight so we can be together on Valentine's Day. It's a St. Valentine's miracle!**