Fictions

Spring is definitely here. Flowers are unfolding.

Sunlight and flowers.

Sunny days seem somehow more luminous.

Blue skies

Afternoons are reliably warmer. I’ve been enjoying it, and regretting that two of my favorite things about Spring can’t be photographed and shared: the scents, and birdsong. I delight in the fragrances of Spring. I’m fortunate that I don’t have those allergies; I can enjoy the scents of Spring without reservation, and generally without any unpleasant consequences. Each recent day has been enhanced, punctuated, and highlighted by new fragrances as different sorts of flowers begin to bloom. It’s wonderful.

Life isn’t all blue skies and flowers, of course, but I feel better equipped to deal with the occasional stress or weirdness. Practicing mindfulness makes a huge difference to both handling the stress, and enjoying the scent of flowers and sounds of birdsong. It continues to be ‘practicing’, too; there is no ‘mastery’ here. I am always beginning, always learning.

Yesterday was well-spent and interesting. I went into it resolved to be in the moment through my challenges, to refrain from taking things personally based on assumptions or baggage, and letting Spring – and life – unfold from the vantage point of student, and of observer. Yesterday, I met with a former partner. The break-up was a messy one, and although it was years ago, I certainly have my own baggage around those events, and experience suggested that I could count on my ex to have a recollection of those events as unique and personal as my own. I wasn’t looking for a confrontation; my ex had reached out to me – quite unexpectedly – to let me know some watercolors and photographs of mine, old ones, had been found – did I want them? The contact was simple. Honest. Cautious. Brief. We arranged to meet. I arrived, my ex met me. We exchanged greetings, a few polite words, a hug. I accepted the offered bag of photos and small paintings and went on my way. No drama. No unpleasantness. Not quite strangers, not adversaries – just people. I contemplated that on the train home. I considered, too, all the ways it could have gone. My fears about it. The stories in my head beforehand, built from other experiences, were varied and bore no resemblance to the event as it happened. We create our experience as we go along. I’m glad I stayed open to possibilities I could not – or simply did not – imagine. I’ve been carrying a lot of baggage, hurt feelings, pain, anger… yesterday I set a lot of it down.

We’ve all got baggage.

The photographs that were returned to me are precious. Photos of me at 22, 23. Some of my own early photography. Some holiday photos in the apartment I lived in as a young soldier in Germany so many years ago. I looked at them closely, considering the moment each represented. I was so young. So lovely. I didn’t feel beautiful at that age. I felt fat. I felt huge. My husband-at-the-time regularly pointed out that I was ‘obese’ and really needed to ‘take off a bunch of weight’. I was 5’6″, a size 4 or 6, and weighed about 115 lbs. The big round curvy ass that he derisively commented on so frequently wasn’t going to disappear from dieting; it’s how I’m shaped, and that was enough to ‘prove’ to me I was fat to the point of grossness at that vulnerable and insecure point in my life. I looked at the pictures with some sadness, wanting very much to reach back in time and tell that younger me how incredibly beautiful she was, and teach her to understand that she could live her own story, and did not need her husband’s fictions to be the woman she most wanted to be. I wondered if anyone had tried to tell me… some of the pictures are of a holiday shared with friends. I contemplated how empty that holiday was, how disconnected, each person living some fiction intended to project something better than the moment, something more wonderful, more powerful, more appropriate, or safer… ‘appearances’. Sitting here this morning in my now, a hot coffee at hand, content and calm, I am finding it hard to imagine anything sadder than depriving ourselves of who we are by ‘keeping up appearances’. Living a fiction was not satisfying for me. It was lonely. Frightening. Isolating.

One of the photographs is a lovely shot of that young me, immersed in a bubble-bath, looking serene, eyes-closed, mouth relaxed. Appearances are insidious. I remember the day. The young woman in that photograph is black and blue beneath the bubbles, just beyond view. Serene? No, hurting, but calm – having survived again.  Those were good moments for the me that I was then, those moments when I could pause and be grateful that I lived. My few friends had no idea; I was very skilled at appearances. 

Some of the paintings I got back are small works, whimsically decorated envelopes, actually, that had contained letters to my lover, away at college. I considered the experience of cherishing a distant love, the experience of writing the letters, painting the envelopes; I was as much in love at that time as I was capable of being. I did not know much about love. I did not understand that being unable to love me, I would be mostly pretty unskilled at loving anyone else. From the future I look back and wonder – was that love? Wasn’t it? Is it fair to say now that it wasn’t, then, when it was the limit of what I was capable of, as far as ‘love’ goes?

We don’t just create the fictions that ‘keep up appearances’, we edit our history to meet our needs in the now, too. We make things a bit more to our liking in the telling, or represent ourselves as being a bit more this than that, because we value those qualities, or feel compelled to tidy up loose ends with a few good words.  Fictions.  Often not even willful deliberate fictions, just erosion of memory over time, or perhaps unnoticed adjustments to cope with trauma. Am I even able to be truly here, now, and hold on to whatever that is into my future recollections of this moment, once it has passed? Each having our own experience, and so much  of it created out of our assumptions, our interpretation, our world view, our expectations, our biases, the limitations of our knowledge, or our senses… Can I ever really know a truth that is unquestionably true?

This morning I glimpsed an understanding of something important for me; mindfulness, and an observing presence in the moment, is as close as I have ever been to ‘the true truth’. The scents of Spring. The sounds of birdsong. The unfolding of flowers. The moments when I am, and nothing more, are the ‘real me’. Quiet meditation. Being. Becoming. Without words.

I look again at that photograph, seeing the strength, the calm, the still moment. She is beautiful, no fiction required.