Everything is weird
Everything is weird.
Being at the hospital is weird.
Being home is even weirder.
Running errands is the weirdest.
When I had to hunt down holiday Rice Krispies at Wal-Mart so my partner could make holiday balls for his co-workers- that was super extra weird. Wal-Mart felt like a big box of cancer.
All the foods with additives. All the chemically sprayed flame-resistant clothing…(how many kids are standing by open flames these days in their nightgowns?)
All the plastic. All the stuff wrapped in plastic.
All the stuffed animals stuffed with some derivative of plastic.
I found myself walking around not wanting to touch a thing, not recognizing a single item I wanted or needed or thought my children needed. Every last bit of it looked fake. Even the vegetables looked fake. I grimaced at the woman sweeping dirt out from under the display shelving in the middle of the day; why couldn’t this happen at night to preserve the illusion of sparkly newness? I don’t want to be reminded of how many humans have tracked in dirt from the street on their way to buy canned pineapple.
I take the kids to Noodles and Company and all I can think is, “How did this food get here? How is it there is enough food every day at every Noodles and Company for all the people everywhere? What are we eating?”
I feel like a stranger in a strange land.
The Biblical phrase, “to be in the world but not of it," rings in my mind. When I was younger, this phrase felt like a blessing, like someone finding me in a crowd and putting their benevolent hand on my head as if to say, “You are special. You are meant for bigger things. Don’t let the world infect you with its worldliness. You are set apart.”
But now, “to be in the world but not of it” feels sad to me. It feels like the plight of sufferers and misfits. To move around the world business as usual but to no longer believe in the purpose of it all is like watching yourself in the movie of your life. The movie is boring and lonely and mostly nonsensical and almost nothing feels familiar.
There is the life we think we are living: a Powerpoint presentation at work, taking care of an elderly parent, having sex or finding people to have sex with, buying a silicone bib for your toddler, cleaning the birdcage, hunting down the best price on oat milk, fixing the bearings on your washing machine, replacing the water filter in your fridge, and then there is the actual life…what Thomas Keating calls “a series of humiliations of the false self…an archaeological dig back through all the stages of your life until you are brought to the rock bottom and it feels like you have died but actually you’ve finally come face to face with who you really are and this is a great and terrible grace.” (my paraphrase).
Suffering rends the veil between what we think is going on and the actual thing happening behind the scenes. It’s the difference between OZ and the stranded old man who calls himself a wizard. We think it’s upward mobility but turns out it’s a downward spiral, a series of humiliations of the false self. All the illusions that made things seem important disappear like vapor and you are left with a great emptiness.
This is why everything is weird now. It all seems so absurd. The things we “have” to do. The things we worry about. The stuff we fill our lives with. The ways we work so hard to convince ourselves that everything makes sense.
Everything does not make sense. My son has cancer and he went ice-skating last week on a school field trip because it’s one of the only “fast” things he can do while still wearing a beanie to cover his bald head. My son went to school today and while I Clorox wiped his desk, his chair, the medicine ball he sits on in circle, his headphones, his laptop, the door handles, and the light switches, he lifted up his shirt to show his teacher the three incisions in his belly from his biopsy on Friday. My son gets lumbar punctures with chemo put into his spinal fluid and then we’re eating Chipotle and telling him he can have lemonade but not a soda. My son sat on Santa’s lap and told him that for Christmas, he would like his cancer to go away.
I remember the rending of the veil SO ACUTELY after our house fire. I was enormously pregnant with my fourth child, wearing someone else’s ill-fitting maternity clothes, those big shirts with frills on the bottom cause right around the belly is exactly where you need a little extra visual weight, over too tight and also too saggy maternity jeans, walking next to Michael who was also wearing someone else’s ill-fitting donated clothing. We were headed into the Apple Store at Tyson’s Corner, a super fancy mall outside of Washington D.C., carrying our smashed laptop like a baby, ready to present it at the Genius Bar in hopes they could resurrect the hard drive and save all of our family photos. It was right before Thanksgiving and everything was already decorated for Christmas. People were shopping their brains out. We walked in like vagabonds and as soon as I sat down at the bar and the attendant asked us what happened, I started to cry. I couldn’t pretend I was ok. I had no nice clothes or makeup or washed hair to hide behind. I had no easily recognizable status (ok, I was in an Apple store but I in no way felt like I belonged there), no energy for amicable conversation. We had ourselves and the story of our house burning down. The attendant opened up the laptop and stared at the bulge in the screen, noting a thousand fissures shooting across the glass. “I’m not sure what’s wrong,” Michael tried to joke. “It just stopped working. So weird.”
The Genius guy looked at us with the “You’re joking, right?” look and we told him how the firemen, in an attempt to rescue our dog from the smoke and flames, axed through a window and smashed right into the laptop. Genius guy listened wide-eyed and then took the laptop to the back with a “let me see what I can do,” while we sat there pitiful and watched the shoppers go by with their presents. The disconnect between us and the rest of the busy important world was palpable.
He came back out a few minutes later and said, “Good news, we can save your family photos. Bad news, this laptop is never going to work again. Good news, we are going to give your family a brand new laptop.” Michael and I both started sobbing, just sobbing, in the middle of the Apple store. The Genius guy smiled and gave us tissues and let his eyes get watery. There was no veil to hide behind. We were dependant upon the kindness of strangers with nothing to offer in return. Humiliated down to the very bones of our real selves.
I will never forget the feeling as long as I live, that this is what we are made for. These kinds of raw human connections. Not to get a laptop replaced for free but to share this moment of longing and gratitude and suffering with another human. Why do we forget? How do we get so distracted?
The tearing of the veil is a great and terrible gift.
It shows you that everything you long for is already here- how great. If you don’t need anyone to tell you who you are or anything to make you who you are, then you already have everything you need. Nothing stands in the way of the life you want.
And it shows you that everything you long for is already here- how terrible. If you don’t need anyone to tell you who you are or anything to make you who you are and you already have everything you need, then why aren’t you experiencing the life you want?
When the veil gets torn, we have to reckon with why we are always putting things on the far side of the veil, tormenting ourselves with an invisible carrot: “Once I’m living in a bigger house, I will have the space I need to feel peaceful.” “Once my children are all in school, I can exercise again, and once I am exercising every day, I will like myself again.” “Once my partner stops working so much, we will be able to connect again.” “Once Phoenix is cured of his cancer, I can let myself enjoy my life again.”
It’s an endless cycle of identifying a thing that stands in the way of happiness, going after that thing, getting that thing, and then finding we are still unhappy. Or maybe we only get two steps in: we identify the thing that stands in the way of our happiness and we go after that thing, and then we spend our entire lives continuing to go after that thing, growing more and more bitter with every passing year of unfulfillment.
This is so often how life goes unless something big enough, like suffering, breaks in and rips down the curtain of illusion.
The truth is: there is nothing behind the veil.
My quality of life is not dependent upon anyone or anything else but me…which means I can no longer blame other people or my circumstances for my own unhappiness. I am forced face to face with my real face. I’ve heard this called interior freedom. I find that it feels like falling. Like groundlessness. Like everything is weird.
When you are released from the wanting, you can’t be dissatisfied.
When you are released from believing you will someday be satisfied, you can experience what you have right now.
When you are released from needing everything to have meaning, you are freed from trying to make sense of it all.
The theologian Pete Rollins calls this the actual Good News of the Christian Gospel.
He says the Good News is not a hole in your heart getting filled. It’s breaking the whole construct that there is a hole, a gap between you and the life you long for. It’s realizing that you have everything you need and at the same time you will never be satisfied, you will never be happy, you will never be free. True liberation is freedom from striving, not freedom fulfilled. Nothing can give you what you think you want so you might as well stop the endless pursuit of it. You are free from the need to be free which paradoxically, is freedom. Freedom is not fulfillment of desire but the freedom from desire itself.
I think of it as a little line from a Wendell Berry poem: WHAT WE NEED IS HERE.
What we need is here and yet I keep catching myself staring at people with my head cocked to the side like a parrot, trying to pick up the words I understand. So many people complaining, about GOOD things. Things like getting the chance to present an idea they’ve been working on forever in front of their colleagues or spending time with their daughter home from college over Christmas break or starting a new relationship. The theme seems to be, “I’m getting the thing I wanted but I don’t feel worthy and so I am scared and now I’m not sure I want it.”
I get it. I do this. Not being able to be present to the life I have because I am always thinking about the life I want to have.
The thing about Phoenix’s cancer is that I don’t really want anything anymore except for him to not have cancer. I have no other desires that need fulfillment. And the desire I do have: for Phoenix to be cancer- free, I have no way of fulfilling. I cannot make it happen. Therefore, I am left with no choice but to release all desire and decide whether I’m going to be ok in this moment between longing and fulfillment. I’m working with the hole, seeing if a longing can be fulfilled by stopping the longing for it. By relinquishing desire and settling into WHAT IS. Because WHAT IS is all I have.
Yesterday, Phoenix went with a friend to a playdate and it occurred to me that they could get in a car accident and Phoenix could die and cancer would have nothing to do with it. I cannot make the ending of cancer my happiness because after cancer, there will always be car crashes; there will always be abductions; there will always be guns in schools; there will always be freak bricks that fall off a windowsill eight stories up onto the head of a two-year-old girl as she sits on a park bench with her grandmother (from the memoir Once More We Saw Stars).
We live in a world where these things happen. Where so much does not make sense. Where everything is weird. Maybe what’s really weird is us trying to resolve the weirdness.
I’m convinced nothing out there will make anything inside here feel better. It’s an inside job. It has to be. Always always always. Fuck.
The trick is how to live in this world that runs on the pursuit of happiness, that banks on selling all of us the next hole-fulfillment device. How do I live in this weird world but not be of it? I will never be happy. I am already happy. I will never have what I need. I have everything I need. Right in the middle, there is a sweet spot. It’s called my life, right now, in this moment- the lived experience of co-existing with everything that is weird and not trying to resolve it. Letting things be. Letting things be weird.
