The best body you'll ever have

My desk - this is not a collage, yet

I follow a hilarious blogger named Karen who today told us of her adventures with a new exercise program, all in search of The Best Body You'll Ever Have. This is the way you get when you turn forty.

Well, this inspired me to comment on her blog, but my comment magically disappeared, due to the fact that I do not have the best mind I've ever had, for I am an unbelievable 29 years older than Karen, though no wiser, and am, in fact, old enough to be her grandmother.  Possibly.

And here's what I had to say:  at this moment you have a body that works.  And, I know how you feel.  I remember this moment well, standing in front of a mirror in the dark little half-bath in my apartment, seeing that I could no longer feel terrific in these expensive blush-pink pants I had, that went with a beautiful print shirt.  I was not a vision of spring but a middle-aged woman in need of a new fashion statement.

Things had happened to my parts while I wasn't paying attention.  Though I weighed almost what I had in high school, it had redistributed itself here and there.  My shoulders were still perfect, they're the last thing to go.  That was about it, in terms of the visuals. In terms of anything that counted, I had a great body.

When I turned forty, my heart had never gone into fibrillation.  My thyroid worked fine without lumps or assistance. I had never broken a bone or torn a rotator cuff. My hearing was perfect, my kidneys worked - and not for a moment did I consider this a miracle of perfect health.  I considered instead those sort of lumps on the outside of my thighs, which have always spent most of their time in a chair.  I considered breasts that did not tempt me to go braless ever again.  I saw that my stomach was rounder.  And under my chin . . .

Not a one of these revisions to my body affected the way it worked or the way I lived.  I could sleep at night, did I mention that?  I could easily get up off the floor anytime I wanted. I could walk three miles every morning, which I did, grimly, trying to be young again.  What was I thinking?

I don't blame myself.  After all, I was thinking like my mother before me, like everything I'd learned growing up, and saw in the culture. My not-so-perfect mind was stuffed full of concepts about my worth and identity that had nothing to do with reality, and less to do with happiness. This stuff is hard to crack, but if you get to live long enough, you start to get it - reality, I mean.

As for today's body---it still works, just more slowly.  It can walk unaided.  It can drive, eat, talk, type.  Sometimes it frustrates me, but I try to be nice to it---it's the best body I'll ever have.

What are you sticking to?

So this morning The Onion tweets me a link on an article titled Terrible Idea Committed to Paper.  It is amusing, how we can be so in love with our ideas and inspirations.  I was struck yesterday with a personal realization about that as I walked, fully enjoying practicing contemplative photography, just seeing without conceptions.

There is a lot you can't do without the use of your dominant hand, and furthermore, a torn rotator cuff in the other shoulder - I don't feel like trying to paint, forget drawing, I can't even sign my name, much typing is out - this already hurts.  I can't even use the camera conventionally, using only one hand to hold it, focus, and click, and I can only use it vertically.  But what a pleasure it was to do that.   

And into my idle mind came Suzuki Roshi's admonition that Zen is about "not sticking to anything."  You know what I've been sticking to?  The idea that I Am a Poet.

I slowly formed this idea in 1997, when I began to write a kind and quality of poetry new to me.  My father's sudden death and my own cancer had broken me open into the need to express creatively my very difficult feelings.  At that time, my skills were only verbal.  My first serious poem was an elegy for the best friend who died when we were eleven.  Fortunately, Ellin Carter, the friendly professor I called and asked to have a look at it, was kind and supportive.  Yes, she said, this is poetry.  Very nice, she murmured, reading it.  For many years after that I worked hard at poetry, loving the sustained act of being in the flow that comes when you're just right.

Right now - maybe I've mentioned this - I am on a higher dose of a psychoactive drug called Seroquel that seems to me to cut down right-brain activity.  Even the lower dose cut my production of poetry way down when I started on it several months ago - I felt it happen and could expect the higher dose to do more of that.  I was willing to lose that kind of creativity for a while to avoid the kind of awful depression that hit me last month.  So the decision demanded a loosening up of my ideas about what I need to do to be happy.

It hit me yesterday as I stood by the pond, listening to the fountains, watching the water ripple and the hanging branches of the willow sway, as I walked, selecting big fallen leaves to crunch underfoot, that taking photographs of this was deeply satisfying and natural, while attempting to make poetry of it was a different sort of effort that took me further away from the reality.  It struck me that I've been sticking to the idea that I am a poet.  Like a noun, a fixed identity.  So this feels more free and easy, and it is another beautiful day.  October is delivering.

On Not Being a Brand

I am reading a terrific book right now titled Different:  Escaping the Competitive Herd by a classy teacher at Harvard Business School, Youngme Moon.  I was drawn to this on the library's new book rack, though I have never really been in business, just on the outskirts.  The intriguing further subtitle of the book is "Succeeding in a world where conformity reigns but exceptions rule."  It made me think of this blog, a continuation of my lifelong difficulty in figuring out my brand - maybe a problem everyone with bipolar disorder, or any type of unusual mind, has.

A blogger expresses his or her brand through format, color choice, name of the blog, profile, self-description. These things have given me varying amounts of trouble through the years of writing this blog, though I stick with the title, which is my daughter Cassie's nickname for me, because  I am deeply and fundamentally Buddhist.  Beyond that, I have at times described myself (my brand) as recipient of a live-donor kidney, cat-lover, feminist, poet, writer, Zen student, lover of the visual arts, PhD in narrative theory, retired teacher, former editor, amateur artist and photographer, old, chronically ill - did I leave out Grandmother?  blah blah blah.  It's partly this slipperiness of identity - because really, I am not any one or two of those things - are you? - it's this changing hodge-podge that finally drove me to drop the description under the title.

I never get too far from the first koan my Zen Teacher gave to me:  Who are you?  At first it made me think over roles like the above, which became like trying to shuffle a deck of cards.  I was frustrated that I couldn't settle on one.  But as I remember my life, I am reminded that when I did see myself as a couple of nouns (wife, mother) I felt stuck in a small space.  And  those nouns were slippery, too.

So I have quit trying.  I never know from day to day what I will be interested in or want to write about, and as a retired person with a parade of physical problems, I don't need to have a goal for my life.  Thus time and chance have let me slip like spirit through the fence and escape the competitive herd.  Just lucky, I guess.

As for a deeper understanding of the koan, it's right there in front of us. 

Think in this way of
all this fleeting world:
As a star at dawn,
a bubble in a stream,
A dewdrop, a flash
of lightning
in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp,
a phantom,
and a dream.
         The Diamond Sutra 

[image:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless, the 1999 film.]