As the days slip by...

Today in the UK it's Holocaust Memorial Day.  Tomorrow is the anniversary of the birth of my son, Ben, who would have been 27.  Both of these days are ones that have particfular meaning and resonance for me and yet, I almost forgot all about them.  If it hadn't been for a small article in the newspaper about some Holocaust survivors, I would not have had reason to look at the calendar.  I am working more than usual right now and just seem to eat, sleep and work without taking much notice of things around me.

I was a  bit taken aback by having forgotten that it would have been Ben's birthday tomorrow.  I can't imagine what he would have been like if he'd grown into a 28 year old man, but I do remember the moment of giving birth to him, this early-arriving, wrinkly tiny scrap of a man.  I can remember the first days of Ben's life and the adjustments we had to make to having a baby around again.  I can remember the next 16 or so months when Ben was in our lives and I can clearly remember the moment he fell ill and the final few days of his life.

More importantly than the events and dates of my son's life I remember how much love there was for him and from him and how much that love permeated everything and carried us through the moments, days, weeks, months and even years of healing we needed after his death.  Is it so important to remember the moment or day of his birth?  I don't think so, I think what caused me to be startled for a moment was that the date was tomorrow and seems to have sneaked up on me.  Hard to explain this.  It's as if he was never really born and never really died, he just visited for a time to bring us heartfuls of love.  Sounds sort of silly, but nonetheless it feels true.  I learned so much from my baby son and I think that everyone around me benefitted from that learning. The date of Ben's birth seems like a physical body memory that its almost irrelevant now, just a day on the revolving calendar.

Holocaust Memorial Day today is another date that actually took me by surprise.  How did it happen that it is today and I knew nothing about it?  Living in England I am often acutely aware of the small number of Jews here and the even smaller number of living Holocaust survivors.  I so closely identify with the survivor population that seeing that today was the memorial and I was not doing anything or involved in anything feels a bit wrong.  It's as if there is a party going on and I am closely related to the guest of honour and I haven't been invited.  Wow, even in writing that I see how wrong that is, but it is a little bit how I feel.

I recognise that I am a bit disappointed in myself for not having done something more pro-active, for not having offered to get involved in speaking to local schools or having written something about my parents and their experiences.  It is important that this date is marked and to see that I let my daily life take over things I want to be more aware of, is a disappointment.  I will mention some of this at work tomorrow and bring it back to why remembering the past is relevant to living in the present.

I actually believe that all these dates are arbitrary.  The day my son was born was not the expected date.  It was five weeks earlier than planned for.  The date chosen for UK Holocaust Memorial Day was, after much discussion, the anniversary of the date on which Auschwitz was liberated.  There are many events happening in London and around the UK today and for the next few weeks.  If I wish to get involved, I can.  For me, my physical involvement is not the point.  The point for me is to remember and to live a better life because of those memories.  Memories can be painful and torturing or they can be life enhancing.  I choose my memories to inform my life in a positive way.  I choose to take away from the 16 months of my son's life the overwhelming wonder of love that accompanied him on his short visit here.  My parents' legacy is one of love and strength and resilience and pure spirit that allowed them both to first survive, and then to live and, I believe, to live well.

So today I will light a candle to these two events and to the lives of those I loved and still love. It is good today to remember again.

Calm descending...

Some scarves I knit!

I sit and knit and sit and knit. I am happy and feel content in a strangely novel manner. What can this all mean? I have not done much differently to usual. I have not begun to meditate or take long, pointless nature walks or even changed my way of looking at the cold, grey weather outside my windows and yet, I am fine. I love this new space and am just happy that I have reached a level of awareness that allows me to notice these things.

Right at this moment I am sitting in a dimly lit room, television on, Deborah Kerr on TV singing the theme tune from one of my favourite movies, 'An Affair to Remember', and just relaxed and easy in myself.  I feel unpressured and unhurried.  There is nothing I urgently have to do in this moment. Yes, there are my annual taxes due in eight days, but eight days is a long time.  As I watch this terribly soppy old film I know that if I watch it all the way through  until the end I will sit in anticipation of the moment when Cary Grant discovers the reason Deborah Kerr didn't meet him at the top of the Empire State Building six months earlier and tears will roll down my cheeks because it's so romantic and sad. I've seen the film about a dozen times. I can almost recite the dialogue and still I cry at the end.  Like an old, old friend, the tears arrive and I sniffle and cry unashamedly. I so enjoy the sentimentality I allow myself now. I am just an old romantic.

I recognise I am getting older. I see it in how much slower I am content to take things. I see it in the small thiings that give me pleasure, the tiny interactions between neighbours and friends in which I delight. All these things seem more important now. When I was younger I had little time for this. I was often in a hurry and somehow felt that I had to pack lots of activity into a day in order to feel alive. Now I feel completely alive regardless of what I do.

I am more interested now in spiritual pursuits.  Actually this is a great name for a new board game, 'Spiritual Pursuits', a game of chance.  I can just see it, you progress round the board  not be finding the right answers but posing good questions.  The players could ask the questions and the enlightened masters of the past and present worlds could provide some answers.  The board would,of course, be a mandala, preferably one you design yourself.  Maybe I'll work on this idea since it tickles me to imagine it.

So, today, as we once again approach 'Blue Monday', unofficially the worst day of the year, what has changed for me that has made me feel so much more balanced?  Why am I in this better space now?  Again, I am busy with definitions so that I can understand my state of mind.

I am certainly not particularly more accepting of people's foibles.  Spending time with friends I am always ready to see the things that irritate me, that get my blood pressure rising, but maybe just a tiny bit,I am also able to allow all those things and see that once again, we are all doing the best we can.  If someone's attitudes or entrenched positions disturb me, I have been a little more willing to take a step back and see whether these attitudes impact directly on me, or if they are simply another person's attitudes and behaviour and stepping away from it is the best action I can take.

Today I read a quote from Dr. Wayne Dyer, a self-help guru. He said,  

"Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear."

Maybe I am learning to be more kind.  I know that I have just slightly less need to be right all the time.  Don't get me wrong, I still like to be right.  Hey, I'm still me, but maybe I've also seen that there is quite a price to pay for always needing to be right.  The price I've identified is that I get to live in a world where everything and everyone is wrong.  What an unpleasant environment to inhabit - the world of wrongness, where I get to sit at the top of the heap and be Mrs. Right.  'Not worth it', I am beginning to think! Also I can see how much energy it takes to keep proving others to be wrong.  I am beginning to want to take things a bit easier and any wasted energy I identify is a plus for my mental health.

So, on approaching the doldrum days of January, on this Sunday afternoon,  I have a huge pot of oranges cooking on the stove, the marmalade jars sterilising and the assembly line process of making marmalade is well in hand.  I enjoy the repetition of this act, from year to year the making of these many jars of marmalade gives my daily life a nice sense of tradition and continuity. It feels good to repeat these things every year and see that it is me who changes.  This year it just seems very simple.

Actually today it all seems pretty simple. Knit, relax, watch TV, chant a bit, make marmalade, cook soup, bake bread.  I am beginning to get it - there is no need to complicate things, life is complex enough.

Puzzles and solving them...

1000 piece jigsaw we just completed!

Today I am busy with looking at my part in everything and my own history. This is prompted by my reaction (and indeed some might say, overreaction) to a friend's behaviour. I am the first to admit that I have many judgments about others and what I deem to be correct or incorrect behaviour.  My inner judge is active so much of the time and because of this I am not surprised when people come up wanting.  I am even less surprised when I myself come up wanting since I am both my own harshest judge and jury.  I am inevitably found guilty and I use the same filter of my own ego and my own past to see others.

If this sounds a bit obscure it's because I don't want to go into too much detail about this except to look at my own actions and what is truly mine in this situation.  I see and believe that it is ALL mine.  My reaction to others has little to do with the behaviour they display. Most of the time the behaviour is not even displayed towards me, but is only observed by me. I put my own spin on things and then put myself into an emotional state based on how I've interpreted what I see. I have to admit, albeit very reluctantly, that I am sometimes wrong. Please, stop protesting, those who know me, know that being right is a full-time occupation for me and to admit otherwise, well, it takes some facing!

During the past weeks I have begun to explore an unfinished piece of my history.  My son died over 26 years ago and I really thought I had resolved all the feelings I carried about this for so many years.  I was certain I had explored, catharted and released all the feelings around his death. Mostly I have. This week I was almost smacked round the head with an awareness of specific unresolved feelings relating to events connected to the time of my son's death. I realise that I am still carrying resentments and feelings about how my mother related to me at that painful time.  For my mum, I think that this death triggered many, many deep, buried painful feelings around the death of her own sister in the ghetto, during the war.  She never talked to much about this as I was growing up, except to mention that it had happened and I think it was one of many traumas that my mum buried in her psyche.  Clearly the death of her grandchild, my son, provoked old pain and became virtually intolerable for her.  At the time I was obviously going through my own stuff and sorely felt the lack of my mother and the strength to cope that I was looking for.  My mother was in her own process and could not be strong for me.  Indeed, to some extent we had to be strong for her since she was in such a bad way.

Looking back from the stance of so many years I see that some part of me still resented that lack and was still carrying much anger.  I was at the time totally unable to see my mother as a separate person with her own pain and her own feelings.  The death of my son was possibly the first death of someone she loved since the war ended.  It was unbearable to her.  I began to see that this week and maybe now I can begin to let that go.  Now when I look back at the pain my mother was suffering I recognise that it didn't change my pain, my sadness, it just meant that I looked elsewhere for that strength.  I was lucky enought to have others to look to.  I see now how taken by surprise my mother was by this onslaught of memory and feeling. She seemed to be shocked by the depth of her despair. For so many years she had tried to repress that pain and suddenly the floodgates opened and she seemed to drown for a while. 

I am sorry now that I couldn't see her then in that state.  I was unwilling, unable to put aside my feelings and I really didn't need to, I just needed to let go of the idea that because this woman was called 'mother' she should have been stronger.  She wasn't. Fact.

We all do what we can. I do believe the people in my life are all doing the best they can.  I am not surrounded by people who live a life of malice and mean-spiritedness.  My friends and my family are good-hearted.  They all strive to bring more love into the world.  It is good for me to see my harsh verdicts on people since these judgments take something healthy away from me and replace it with vindictiveness and negativity.  This hurts everyone, especially me. Forgiveness, of them and of myself can happen after 26 years, 26 minutes or even 26 seconds.

I am learning to live more accurately.  It sounds odd, but for me it means to see facts as facts, to see behaviour as what it is, rather than how I interpret it or interpret the meaning I give to it. This is an on-going process and rather like the jigsaw puzzle of 1000 pieces that we just completed, it takes time and patience and a willingness to carry on looking to see where things fit. After all this time, adding another piece to the puzzle feels very good.

Uninvited guest...

Last year it was oh so simple.  I wrote all about my misery, my depression and my feelings of hopelessness.  As a result of that I had lots and lots to say and proceeded to say it in thousands of words.  This year I suddenly find myself almost wordless.

It is a revelation to spend the winter undepressed.  I have watched for it, waited and looked over my shoulder and round every corner and it's just not there. Like an annual reunion visitor, I have laid a place at the table for it and put out the guest towels to welcome my old friend depression and it just hasn't arrived.  Certainly there are other winter symptoms.  The overwhelming tiredness I've written about before hasn't changed.  My winter ursine urges to hibernate haven't much improved, but the rest - well - poof! vanished.  Up in thin air.  Gone, kaput, ended.

I would like to understand this better.  My old friend and teacher, Frank Natale, always encouraged us to find out how we create what we have and choose in our lives, so that we could either repeat the things that turned out successful or avoid repeating the mistakes we don't want.  It concerns me that I have no idea how this state of equilibrium came about and that makes me slightly nervous.

I also suddenly feel less interesting to myself.  After all, sitting in a small heap and contemplating my own misery-soaked navel gave me lots of blog fodder.  Being in a more balanced and for sure, more ordinary state of ok-ness does not interest me nearly as much.
What this does show me is my addiction to the dramatic and the crises-ridden state I have always considered  normal.  I feel like I also need to redefine normal for myself.  If it is not normal to feel so low that you want to jump off a roof, or so high that you hug trees, then the middle ground, the balanced, rather quieter state becomes normal.

I am quite enjoying this unfamiliar state of normality.  I do suffer a bit from 'Drama-Queenitis" and like the madness that usually accompanies my mood swings, but I also recognise how many tears and tantrums go with the more volatile winter moods and I can live without the impact of thiose mood swings.  My work goes much better when I am more even. I also enjoy this state of being without needing to scream.

I heard myself yesterday saying to someone who was complaining about feeling down during these wintry, short and gloomy days, 'Relax, we've passed the shortest day now, the days are getting longer now and soon it will be Spring'.

Who is this strange woman I see before me in the mirror and why isn't she as crazy as the Cynthia I usually see?  I wish I knew, but I do know I like her.

Spirit lives beyond us...

This week a woman named Debbie Friedman died well before her allotted years. She was younger than me and I didn't know her.  I never met her.  She lived in America and I knew little about her private persona. All I knew was that she was a singer/songwriter and her music touched me very deeply.

Debbie wrote music for Jewish liturgy, or rather her music became that which was used in Jewish services throughout the world.  She seemed to be a rather unassuming woman.  I never read much about her or knew of her circumstances, but I knew her voice.  The first time I heard her music I think was when my son was in Hebrew School and studying for his bar mitzvah.  I originally thought some of her songs were a bit 'hokey', a bit soppy and sentimental and didn't give her music another thought.

About a year or two later, when my mother was very sick and dying of cancer I found a tape of Debbie Friedman's music amongst my mother's things.  I began to play it whenever I was sitting with my mum.  The music seemed to soothe her increasingly distressed spirit and without giving it much attention, it began to do the same for me.

This all took place at least ten years before I began chanting and found people like Krishna Das, Jai Uttal and Premal and Miten.  I didn't know then the power of music to feed me on a soul level, I only knew that Debbie Friedman's singing touched something very deep in me and it felt both sad and good at the same time.

After my mother died I took this tape cassette of Debbie singing home with me and threw it into a drawer.  I didn't pull it out again for a few years.  I put it into the cassette player in my car and when I put it on I was once again transported to my mother's bedside and remembering the preciousness of that time.  I also found the music uplifting and sometimes quite beautiful.. her music combines Hebrew prayer with folk-like melody.  I found myself singing along as I drove and the melodies stayed with me for days. some of the tracks were still a bit syrupy for me, but I loved the simplicity of them and the clear sound of Debbie's voice.

A few years later, my dear friend, Pragit, died suddenly and there was one song that kept playing in a repeating loop in my head.  It was a song called Lechi Lach. The words expressed for me a message that I so wanted my old friend to hear and I sang it to myself and played the track again and again in the days following Pragit's death.

"Lechi lach to a land that I will show you
Lech li-cha to a place you do not know
Lechi lach on your journey I will bless you
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach"

The death of this stranger has touched me more deeply than I can express and has taken me completely by surprise. I owe her a debt of gratitude for bringing another source of joyful beauty into my life.  It's perhaps not the best music in the world, it's not Beethoven, hell, it's not even James Taylor, but it helps me to soar above my day to day world and find something of spirit in myself.   

I wish Debbie Friedman a beautiful passage to wherever and whatever comes next.  She was indeed a blessing to so many and I thank her for that.

I have never put links on my blog to anything, but if you want to hear her singing :

Please listen to it here:

http://www.ritualwell.org/lifecycles/babieschildren/babynamingsimchatbat/sitefolder.2005-06-07.5117027380/file.2005-06-30.6510658864

287...

Yesterday...

287 entries on this site.  I've written down thoughts 287 times and there have been almost 5700 views of the pages I've written.  I find this extraordinary.  I rarely have anything terribly important to say and the fact that a number of people get something out of reading what I write still astounds me.

I've spent a bit of time thinking about what I should write about and today it became clear that I need to explore my need to self-sabotage.  Let me explain this so I can feel clear about what I mean without being overly dramatic. I know this makes a change for me, since melodrama is my middle name, but I am trying to be less hysterical and more reasonable. By self-sabotage I mean that I seem to have an unconscious desire to mess things up just when they're going right.

I have now lost about 18 lbs (8.5 kgs).  This is finally an amount that shows and the clothes that I relegated to the 'don't fit' pile now fit me again.  I feel better,my back hurts less and I really like the way I look.  I do have more to lose, but it's a great start.  So what did I do today?  I bought a box of biscuits and ate over half the box in one fast gulp.  I knew what I was doing.  I consciously bought the biscuits, no one sneaked them into my shopping next to the cottage cheese. I also knew that I would get home, put the television on and scoff the lot.  At least I stopped at just over half the packet.

As I was eating these biscuits I experienced a definite sense of deja vu.  I've been at this point before. Every time I lose some weight I get to a point where I feel I okay, I look fine and my weight is at a reasonable, if not ideal, level and then I begin to gain the weight back again.  I start to slip back into old patterns of eating and stop eating in as healthy a manner.  I start skipping meals, as I did this morning, so that a packet of biscuits seems like a reasonable thing to buy.  Before I can really stop and think,my weight starts to creep up. This is what I mean by self-sabotage.  I am easily placated with the attitude that 'it'll do for now', even though it could be, I could be, so much better.

It's not about how much weight I lose or don't lose. It's about an awareness and mindfulness that I let go.  It's about the fact that this is a repeating pattern for me.  I always achieve nearly my goal and then start to slip.  I get to nearly the finish line and I often have thoughts about it being enough, and so I stop making an effort and slow down to a crawl and then stop.  I've done it hundreds of times in so many areas of my life. Good to see it now, before I stop again.

Today... different day, different thoughts

As I was driving today and singing at the top of my voice I remembered Krishna Das talking about living in grace and realised that I had no real idea of what that meant.  It seemed so esoteric, so unbounded by my everyday life and mundane worries and so far away.  Far away from my visit to the dentist, my shopping expeditions and my thoughts about tonight's dinner menu.  I came home and started reading about grace, about what it means to live in a state of grace, a state of infinite beauty and blessing and then I got it, just for a tiny moment, I got it. 

Love it all.

Two days in...

The second day  of a new year and already I've been asked what my resolutions are for this year.  I decided last year that I wouldn't waste energy on making empty promises to myself or others about what I would do or not do in the coming year.  It feels such an arbitrary thing.  The calendar says it's a new year and therefore time to re-assess our lives.  The calendar says that another year has passed and on this specific date we should stop and acknowledge it by giving up things, joining gyms or starting detox diets.

It seems to me that this process of self-examination or navel-gazing is often a sop to our consciences.  It makes us all feel better if on the cusp of this paper-induced new year we promise ourselves and others that we will do things differently, that we will change our behaviour, our actions, our life circumstances over the next 365 days and then at the end of 365 days we do the exact same resolution thing again. If this process really worked my friends, family and I would be close to achieving perfection.  We are not.

When asked by some friends the inevitable questions about what resolutions I've made I stopped for a moment and thought about it.  What am I going to stop this year?  What am I going to start?  Am I going to DO anything differently?  The answer is an unreserved no.  I am not going to resolve to DO anything.  I know that I will achieve some things, disappoint myself in others and maintain an organic stasis overall. I will not vow to lose weight, though if I do, great. I have already stopped smoking.  I might, and this is a slight might, join a gym.  I certainly will carry on writing this blog, though I no longer have the same burning need to release feelings and reveal my thinking to myself as I did a year ago and I know that I will carry on watching bad television and secretly reading the National Enquirer at airports.

I would love to be able to say that I will change the way I eat and become a health freak doing all that I can to ensure that I live to be a hundred, but I know that I am ultimately too lazy to do all that that entails.  I will maintain my friendships and this past year has given me the rare and special opportunity to make new friends.  I will continue to knit like a mad Madame Defarge at the guillotine.  I will try and learn to use my sewing machine by overcoming my irrational fear of the damned thing, but if I don't, it doesn't matter too much since I really love sewing things quietly by hand.

One answer I gave a friend when asked about my resolutions was that I will endeavour to play some new games this year.  I am tired of all the games I play in my life - the ones that fool me into thinking that I am doing something.  This year I may play happier games, more positive ones and maybe even some that make me feel good.  I am not a positive person.  I am enthusiastic and creative, but I have never been referred to as positive.  Maybe this year I can be a tiny bit more optimistic though this is hardly a given.  If it naturally evolves, so be it.  If I become a more positive, optimistic woman the biggest problem I would have would be working out how I would ever recognise myself. 

So, as this second day of 2011 comes to an end, I will make a promise to do one thing - try to live more fully. good, bad, indifferent - whatever comes I will try to be open to new experiences, new reactions and new responses.  The same old stuff has so far yielded the same old stuff.  I am not resolving to do anything except be less bored this year.  It worked pretty well last year, so I think I'll try it again.