The Beautiful Answer

On Returning Home

Someone a lot smarter than I am once said that you can never go home, and perhaps that’s true. You can’t go back to the home you remember because either it’s grown and changed, you’ve grown and changed, or it never existed in the first place, outside the realms of your mind.

I love the way this speaks to the Buddhist concept of impermanence — that shit won’t always be the same, be it your luxury condo in Boca, your health, your life or your solitude. Nothing lasts forever, my friend. That’s what made the Buddha a pretty smart dude for his time, and for pretty much forever. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the child of a privileged nobleman would feel about the nonsense going on in the name of Wall Street and the economy these days (the Buddha started out as a prince, for those who don’t know), but that’s another story, for another time.

I don’t get back to New York that much, but lived here for almost eight years in the late ’80s and early ’90s. A lot of stuff has changed, in keepinq with the theme of impermanence. Times Square looks like Tokyo, and everything is screamingly expensive. People look unhappy, and I wonder if I used to be one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I love New York, as the bumper sticker goes. You can even buy Yankees Chapstick here, and dump it into the East River if you’re a Red Sox fan. But I don’t miss the person I was when I was here — confused, angry, overtired and overworked, carrying an attitude bigger than Montana on my shoulders. As I write this I feel happy to be the person I am now, the person I worked really hard to become. But I feel a little sad, too, for the girl I was. Maybe it’s time to lay her to rest, those parts of me that probably never served much anyway. They got me here, they helped me live, and now they need to go once and for all. So I’ll reframe this moment, and send them off like beautiful Japanese lanterns floating down a gentle river, released forever, never to come back in this lifetime. Thanks for bringing me here.

Greed Sucks

It’s been interesting over the past few days, watching the Wall Street protests in New York (or not as the case may be, if the media doesn’t feel like covering them). Though they don’t seem to be pegged to anything other than a sense of being ripped off and taken advantage of for too long, it’s important that they’re out there. 

As the recession worsens, with jobless benefits running out and health insurance and dignity merely distant memories for most people, it’s an ongoing mystery why all the stimulus money of last year, which was supposed to spur new hiring, has been mostly banked by large corporations. I guess they’re saving to pay the higher-ups their million dollar bonuses for the next five years or so. Important stuff. 

I see greed in its other aspects, too. Today, a friend of mine had to almost choke out a congratulations on my new book proposal going out to my agent yesterday (actually it didn’t come out that way; I kind of finished the half sentence for her, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt). Emotions and not saying what you want to say is a type of greed, as is not letting someone in to traffic, or even withholding love when you’re mad at your partner. 

I think we can all agree that greed sucks. But what to do about it?  I can’t single-handedly change the entire financial world, just as you can’t make everyone be nice to other people.

To reframe, I imagined myself as attached but separate — to the financial institutions, other people who may be withholding in nature, or even the concept of greed. I felt my way into it as an energy, but couldn’t even get very far. It felt very tight and clenched, somehow unknowable. I saw the threads connecting me to them as thin and slight, and I was free to move as I wished. 

When I stopped visualizing, my lungs seemed a little clearer, and the headache I’ve had all day seemed a little less intense. I don’t know how, but I want to keep working on greed, in the spots I’m blind in myself, and in the world at large. Certainly, with so many of us against the blind greed of huge corporations, we can make an impact of some kind.