Susan Senator

I was reading Real Simple waiting for Ben at the dentist, an article about meditation, of all things. I don’t meditate, I medicate. Ha ha. No, the truth is, I’ve always wanted to meditate, but I didn’t really know how. Blank your mind? Empty your mind? In my brain, the minute one thought leaves another one moves right in. Sometimes there is overcrowding.  My head is like a poorly-run group home, where the uneven ratio of helpful thought to overly active impulses spells trouble most of the time.

My tumultuous emotions and high stress levels make me a perfect candidate for meditation, and so I read the article with great interest. The bit that stuck in my mind the most equated the meditative state with watching a river flow, where your thoughts are like leaves floating by.  Leaves floating by, I thought. I can do that.

Since reading that I have found several opportunities to try this out. Once was after a particularly disappointing phone call. I envisioned the stream and the leaf and noticed that this metaphor allowed me to have a kind of distance from my feelings that I have never felt right when something bad has happened.

I tried this several more times; there was no emptying of my head, no need to push thoughts away to maintain some kind of blankness. Rather, the simple practice of picturing the curled brown leaf passing along on the curve of the current gave me a recurring separation from the event. One day later — today — I had the realization that what this was doing for me was showing me for the first time in my life that feelings, events, pass by. I am not my feelings. I am not what happens to me. I am something else, next to, or underneath the feelings.

My insight stops there. I’m not ready for more. I have a friend who is a master yoga teacher, a longtime meditator, a person who is  beyond being crushed by others and brought low by weaknesses or events because she knows, just knows, that there is so much more to us, to life, than this particular body, this particular moment in time.

I have not been able to listen to her. I don’t like those thoughts of hers. I want to matter, I want my moment in time to be utterly unique and momentous. In fact, she and I don’t really talk to each other anymore, because of these large differences in our outlooks. And yet there is some comfort I have found from my little leafy stream exercise, some measure of sanity and sweetness I am getting from that small distance from — but not repression of — my bad feelings.

The phone rang a little while ago and it was Martin, from Nat’s former group home at school. He was just calling. He wanted to know how Nat was doing. I told him all the news — the surprisingly easy transition to home, the new job at CVS — and Martin was clearly delighted. He spoke to Nat himself, but I could see that Nat was worried that this call might mean he was not going to his “new apartment in winter,” which is what we are calling his new group home. A while back I told him it would happen in the winter, and so this is what Nat calls it.  (All I can say is, the thing better be ready soon, because today is the first day of winter!)

I hung up the phone and felt my tight chest, the clogged feeling of an overstuffed heart. I am just so blown away by what people are capable of, by the reality of love. I realized that love was one of those feelings that does not flow by me, however. Love gets stuck on a rock or in a throat.

I sat on the corner of the couch, in the light, near Nat. He was leaning on his hand, looking at me. His brows were raised. I said, “It was so great of Martin to call.”

“Apartment in winter,” Nat whispered.

“Yes, darling, of course,” I said. “Martin was just calling because he loves you. You are still going to the house, the apartment that we saw on Saturday. Soon.”

“Yes.”

“So many people love you Nat.”

“Yes.”

We just looked at each other, and I felt how special he is, that particular human being, this particular moment, this life.