"But even so..."
Cultivating a mindset of impermanence
The boy passes me on the hill, going up as I am going down. Until I see him the fact that I am on a hill hadn’t registered, even though this is the road I use almost exclusively whenever I leave home. A car is a bubble; it does all the work and I just have to aim it at where it needs to go, terrain notwithstanding as long as there is a relatively flat and hard surface to ride upon. A bicycle is a different experience altogether. Here he is—every eyelash of him from his mop of springy curls to the toes of his sneakers—straining for the summit, skinny young legs pumping furiously. I think, dedicated effort. I think, poetry in motion. I do not think, Be careful! This is a busy road! The boy is not a young and vulnerable human but a metaphor, forcing me to acknowledge my own inertia by contrast to his momentum. I receive my lesson and drive on, homewards, my internal clock ticking seconds closer to our impending leave-taking.
At home I write in red ink on a yellow Post-it note and stick it over my heart, where it clings like a temporary license plate to my thin cotton shirt. I have just finished a section in Susan Cain’s Bittersweet about a business conference she attended where a friend of hers, also named Susan (Susan David), was leading a workshop about what her friend called “emotional agility.” Many of the exercises in the workshop involved just such a yellow Post-it. In the chapter of her book titled, “How can we transcend enforced positivity in the workplace and beyond?” Cain describes one such exercise:
We’re each given our own Post-it, on which we’re to write an “I am” statement about ourselves, based on a memory or a self-conception that holds us back:
“I am a fraud,” someone writes.
“I am selfish.”
“I am needy.”
Susan advises us to choose something we’ll be comfortable sharing with one other person in the room. But she also invites us to go deep: “You’re not saying there’s something wrong with you. You’re not saying that you have a pathology. You’re saying that you’re human. Welcome to humanity1.”
Cain will repeat that phrase again at the end of her chapter, welcome to humanity. For now, she goes on to talk about how each person was asked to put their Post-it on their chest and describe how it feels to be wearing something so vulnerable more-or-less on their shirtsleeve. “‘That is not something we typically do,’” says Cain’s friend, Susan, “We typically wear our armor: jewelry, shoes, suit jackets. How does it feel?’”
People call out the answers. They shout them out, in a hurry, as if they can’t wait.
“It feels uncomfortable,” they say.
“It feels exciting.”
“Exposed.”
“Heavy.”
Then, one answer that I’ll always remember:
“Real. It feels real.”
How does mine feel? I look down at my Post-it, reading the handwritten words upside down:
It feels…shameful, like admitting that I’m still scared of the dark. It also feels weighty, in a good way: an anchor to earth; a line between my ephemeral soul and my gravity-bound body. I. Am. Terrified. Of. Leaving. Over the Christmas holiday we were gone for four days visiting family only an hour and a half away and I stressed for days beforehand over everything we needed to take and spent many anxious moments wondering what, inevitably, I would forget. As soon as we got home and unloaded the car I trudged a brief, breathless circlet of our property, greeting each of my favorite trees in turn, exuberant with joy and relief at having made it through another busy holiday and back in my favorite place on earth. My favorite place on earth: I hadn’t even known that was true until it happened, until I found myself nearly giddy with delight at being reunited with my trees, my land. Every other place I’ve lived since moving out of my childhood home has been temporary and felt it, but here I’ve grown roots. It feels good, even knowing it might not be permanent, as my husband’s work situation is far from settled and finding another job within driving distance would be almost impossible in his field. I will grieve this place if we leave it. I am reminded of this each time we prepare for a night or a weekend or a week away.
It will be a week this time, but overseas; farther away than I’ve ever been, truly out of reach. What if something happens to our animals, or our house, or my garden, while we’re gone? What if something happens to a close friend or family member and we’re too far away to help? What if something happens to us? What if we don’t all make it back? Because it isn’t only leaving that frightens me, it is LEAVING. The permanent kind. Of this, Cain shares:
In “Spring and Fall,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes to a young girl who’s upset that the leaves are falling from the trees in “Goldengrove”:
Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?
He doesn’t tell her to stop crying, he doesn’t say that winter is beautiful, too (even though it is). He tells her the truth about mortality:
It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for.
This advance mourning over our mortal condition is a state with which all mystics are familiar. As Sufi teacher and writer, Kabir Helminski, puts it:
Our situation as human beings is that we live in a world of pain and death. No amount of pleasure can negate this reality. Our means of pleasure is the body, and the body is subject to satiation, sickness, and death…There is a terror in living with a body that is irrational, fallible, and, finally, mortal2.
As I read the above passage for the first time I noticed how my body was absorbing the words. My eyes became tight and started to burn with the first hint of tears. My shoulders curled in slightly, protectively. My breathing became shallow, the way it does when I am making myself smaller. My spirit, by contrast, felt as though it were expanding rapidly beyond the reaches of my body, and there was a warm, stretching sensation in my chest. I wonder if this is, just a bit, like dying. Am I…practicing? Is that weird? Susan Cain doesn’t seem to think so. To her, reactions like this are quite normal and even practical, and she has the research to back it up. Like a ten year study undertaken by psychologist Dr. Laura Carstensen that suggests that older people are happier than younger people. The people in the study included those from ages 18 to 94, and all were required to check in by pager at random times of the day and night concerning their emotional state. Dr. Carstenson “found that the older people reported less stress, anger, worry, and distress than the young and middle-aged.” In addition, Dr. Carstensen identified what she and her team called a “positivity bias” in older adults:
While younger adults tend to have a “negativity bias,” predisposing them to focus on unpleasant or threatening cues, older people…are more likely to notice and remember the positive. They focus on smiling faces; they tend to ignore the frowning and angry.
This tendency towards happiness, Dr. Carstensen hypothesized (and later research has seemed to support the claim), is due to the growing awareness of mortality. “The young delude themselves that the music will never stop playing,” writes Cain about Dr. Carstensen’s findings:
So it makes sense for them to explore rather than savor; to meet new people rather than to devote time to their nearest and dearest; to learn new skills and soak up information, rather than to ponder the meaning of it all; to focus on the future rather than to remain in the present. Poignancy, for the young, may be touching, but it can feel irrelevant to the daily act of living.
This is all “wonderful, of course, in an expansive, life-building way,” Cain continues:
But when you know, really know, that you won’t live much longer, your perspective narrows—and deepens. You start to focus on what matters most, stop caring so much about ambition, status, and getting ahead. You want the time you have left to be charged with love and meaning. You think about your legacy; savor the simple act of being alive.
This is true, according to Dr. Carstensen, of even young adults who have been made to face their own mortality. The practice of poignancy, far from being morbid and unhealthy, can actually lower our stress and anxiety and bring us deeper joy and contentment. But even so…it is painful, and we must lean into the pain, as with any exercise, to reap the benefits. Cain starts the chapter in her book titled, “Should we try to ‘get over’ grief and impermanence?” with a story about Japanese Buddhist poet, Issa, who, after a lifetime of hardship (including the loss of his first two children in their infancy), was finally given a beautiful, healthy baby girl…only to watch her die of smallpox before she turned two. From his well of grief poured many treasured poems, including this one:
It is true That this world of dew Is a world of dew. But even so...
“There’s a big difference,” writes Cain about this poem, “between awareness and acceptance. Which is why “this world of dew/Is a world of dew” isn’t the heart of Issa’s poem. Its true, thrumming center is those three unassuming words: But even so.”
But even so, says Issa, I’ll long for my daughter forever. But even so, I’ll never be whole again. But even so, I cannot accept, will not accept, do you hear me as you whisper that I do not accept the brutal terms of life and death on this beautiful planet. But even so, but even so, but even so.
This month, as I prepare to embark on one of the biggest and most exciting adventures of my life, feels like just the right time to practice impermanence. In just a few more days I will be leaving home, and I cannot know if I will return to it again, or if it will be here when I do. I cannot know what next week will bring, or tomorrow, or next minute. I do not get to know how long I will live, or how I will die, or which of my loved ones I will grieve and which will grieve me. None of us do. The human condition is, as fellow bittersweet soul, Glennon Doyle, coins the term, “brutiful—brutal and beautiful3.” And I don’t have to be OK with that. I can hate it, even. But I do need to stop pretending that I can ignore my mortality; because the effort of ignoring it is exhausting, life-draining, and preventing me from leaning in to my one, precious, brutiful life while I have the chance. On this side of the ocean, while passing a boy on a bike, or “across the pond.”
Cain, Susan. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. N.p., Random House LCC US, 2022.
Helminski, Kabir. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation. United States, Shambhala, 2000.
Doyle, Glennon. Untamed. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2020.