This is Me, Begging

Please please please smear yourself all over

Wow! Friends—I was overwhelmed by the generosity of your responses to this blog when I made a plug for it last week. THANK YOU.

I hope this writing can offer a voice of encouragement in the midst of our meaner, internalized conditioning. There are so many rules our culture has asked us t

o live by—let me name some of the ones that bound me into knots. Maybe they’ll feel familiar…  

1. Creativity is a hobby for kids. Grown-ups get serious.

2. If you are not at the top of whatever field you’ve chosen, you’re a middling failure. (AKA: if you can’t be perfect, don’t try.)

3. Satisfaction = complacency.

How often do we hear some variation of: we see the world not as it is, but as we are…? It’s such a platitude it feels empty. Until one day you’re shocked awake and realize your great Auntie was right all along!

I began to question a lot of cultural assumptions as a teenager and I had the usual, shady ideas on how to combat them. I experimented with drugs, criticized the ‘man’ and became annoyingly self-righteous. But in the end, I was also curious about the inside. I got my education and I got my good job. I was repelled and also attracted by the rules of engagement. If I’m being honest, I find a rule liberating. Nothing like somebody telling me what to do to take the pressure off my over-active brain.

Three years ago, I read a book called The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz. I finished it in one day—some of which involved getting zapped by a dermatological laser—and even while I jumped and yelped in pain, I felt like a bright light had gone off right above me. (Well, I guess one had.) Ruiz talks about how we are conditioned by the cultural agreements we make. He gives you four new agreements to get yourself free. They’re good, and they’re his, so buy the book.  

But it made me think—if this random dude is giving me rules and I feel that they’re so true I’m ready to drop everything and follow them, why can’t I dig deep and remember my own? I needed someone to offer me that possibility; to give me permission to consider my inner values and proceed from them.

Shortly after I read The Four Agreements, we visited extended family. I knew I didn’t want to see them in my typical, combative way. On the plane, with a baby under a nursing apron, I whispered new rules into the notes section of my iPhone. They’re a little bit hesitant and corny, and 2018 me would be horrified to share them.

1) I am a loving, joyful person 2) People are good 3) I am raising my children in love, good humor and integrity 4) I am doing work that I love with trust and faith 5) Contentment is not complacency; it’s a practice. Below, I wrote this: “this year I will relax through my mind’s need to find conflict or muscle big changes; I will relax through my desire to keep account of rights and wrongs. Don’t clutch, don’t think, don’t panic. Trust.”

I felt both relieved and insane. But I suspended disbelief and trusted that these were the things I wanted to believe; maybe wanting was enough.

Our visit was great. I still remember one of the walks I took on the beach in the sunset while my husband put our children to sleep. I felt, for the first time since I’d done mushrooms in a lightning storm in a field at age seventeen (yes) that I was completely connected to the source of creation. If I hadn’t identified my new rules, that sunset walk would have involved me muttering to myself all the great comebacks I didn’t think of at dinner.

The compassionate qualities I directed towards myself made the people around me easier to be with. Defensiveness was off the table for everyone. And so, it began to be true to me: we see the world as we are.

Or, using a more active verb: we smear our inner qualities over everything.

To please my doubting mind, I’ve taken to documenting ways these new agreements positively affect my life. A perfect example would be publishing my frailties here and having them received with warmth and generosity—#4: trust the work that I love. Clearly, creative work and encouragement shouldn’t end in elementary school. Your responses to this writing made me appreciate our shared thirst for expression.

Eventually, the vice-grip of assumptions I carried for so long just dissolved. Perfect isn’t the point; it’s not even the aspiration. The beauty is in the vulnerability and sharing is a gift. Also: it’s good to be satisfied, even when we don’t have everything we want. Contentment now is the goal no matter what we aspire to. (More on this later.)

If this feels abstract or a long way off, I get it. I was a consummate deconstruct-er, doubter and judger-of-rights-and-wrongs that day I boarded the plane. I literally worked as a prosecutor: my job was to accuse people of crime and try to put them in jail. But I now believe that believing in a benevolent world is a choice. And that has made all the difference.

If you were waiting for permission to change your rules, here it is. And I wonder: how would you express yourself if you had no fear? Fuck it—this is not permission, this is me begging. Please please please do the thing. Smear it all over.