Breaking and Entering

Birthdays are like party crashers. They show up in your life uninvited and start making demands. More drinks, more cake, more attention. New shoes with your $5 off birthday coupon from Famous Footwear. Sometimes, you just have to invite them in and pretend you know them.

The other day, in an attempt to make friends with my 72nd birthday, I decided to treat myself to a half day at Kripalu, the yoga center. They were hosting TEDxBerkshires 2017, a program of TED talks by local luminaries accompanied by the usual gourmet vegan lunch offerings, yoga classes and meditation. I am by nature an underdeveloped consumer and almost never buy myself anything. This may be an area of self-improvement I'll want to focus on going forward. Maybe I'll make it part of my spiritual practice to indulge in some unusual self-gifting in every remaining year on or around the 2nd of August. In any case, I was terribly pleased with myself for whipping out my VISA card to make this purchase. Entering my card number filled me with a great sense of reckless abandon. So much so that I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of almonds to further feed myself. I bit down on a hard, resistant nut and immediately cracked off substantial chunks of tooth and old filling, crumbling teeth being an inadequately acknowledged aspect of aging. What are we to learn from this episode? Nuts can be bad for your teeth? Impulse buying is a sign of poor character and must be punished? The jury is out.

About four days before the Kripalu incident, I was sitting in my meditation sangha, experiencing a particular serenity. Outside the building, it was high summer in the Berkshires. Not wall-to-wall-traffic-in-Great Barrington high summer, but the lilies-blooming-and-bullfrogs-croaking kind. Inside, seven or eight people I don't know well, but feel connected to in a way I can't explain, were practicing in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Order of Interbeing. After the sit, there was walking meditation and dharma sharing. At the end of the 90 minute gathering, I went out to the parking lot in the late afternoon mid-July sunshine, got behind the wheel and backed into someone else's car. As I am in thrall to the need to uncover meaning in events, my first thought was - you better watch where you're going. My second thought was - I'm probably not as serene as I think.

Glimpses of serenity appear like weekend getaways from a pervasive underlying grind of vulnerability. No matter how many planks and bridges I execute on the gym floor, I am fragile. I am open to criminal mischief. I am human and I can be hurt. I am mortal. I will not always be here with my narrow shoulders and wide hips the way I am now. The reality is I have almost no control over anything. I can be more careful in parking lots, but sooner or later there will be damage, maybe even blood. Considered in this light, these petty larcenies are God's way of breaking and entering me, barking at me until I recognize what I am determined to resist. Nothing is forever. Serenity would be advised to learn to tolerate its noisy downstairs neighbor vulnerability.

Once, when I was 40ish, I was sitting in a restaurant in West Stockbridge with a group of friends, eating and drinking, partying in that moony, indifferent way we used to party. The table was set with burning candles. In those days, I had an unruly head of frizzy hair, my unkempt curls extending in all directions. When I leaned forward, the better to share the vodka-marinated moment with my friends, my hair caught on fire. But because the split ends were so far away from my scalp, I didn't feel the heat. I wasn't aware that I was seconds from immolation, from going up in flames like yesterday's papers, until my friend, Jimmy, himself dead only a few years later, threw his jacket over my head and extinguished the fire. I guess you could say that was a wake-up call. Now, I'm wondering, what was the common parlance for this light bulb effect before hotels offered wake-up calls and do we need a new word now that we are all responsible for our own getting woke?


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