I'm sitting on the deck with my coffee and it's another wonderfully cool and crisp Autumn morning. These temperatures bring so many memories.
Every morning when I open the door to the back deck I'm flooded with waves of nostalgia...carving pumpkins in 5th grade with my best friend Tonia, trick-or-treating up and down my old street in Florida, waiting for the bus in the chilly morning air.
I've been remembering my first fall in New York as well. I had classes three nights a week over in the West Village and every evening around 6:15 I would leave my apartment on Avenue B and walk up 7th Street to Astor Place and then up Broadway to 12th Street where I would cut across to 6th Avenue. I was so young! Only twenty. I remember buying my first fall jacket and the way I'd pull my arms tight around me on my walk home, the night growing cold as it grew later.
It's so strange to have spent these last five years in California. There were no seasons, no real sense of time passing at all, just one continuously gorgeous day, the wide open sky and palm trees stretching on endlessly.
Here, in this new city, in this new life, I can feel my circadian rhythms reconfiguring themselves.
Yesterday was a nice day. I finally got most of the boxes unpacked. There's only two left now. I hung a lot of things on the wall, padding around the house with my hammer, some nails held between my teeth, reaching on my tip-toes to see how something looked above that bookshelf or behind that lamp. And then standing back to admire my handiwork. It felt good.
In the afternoon I took a long walk, dropping off notes in the post box, stopping in at the bank and then walking up Belmont to the harbor where I strolled along the lake for a while. I wound my way back through Lincoln Park's quiet, tree-lined streets exploring my neighborhood further, popping into little shops and storefronts. I found a wonderful little artisanal cheese shop on Broadway and I bought a pretty red rug for my kitchen and I joined a gym. I went to my local grocery store and got some milk and spinach, and then I walked home with my bags through my bustling little neighborhood.
In the evening I went to a Buddhist meditation class. I really just wanted to stay home and make a hot meal, watch the Sopranos, and write emails, but I've been meaning to get back into meditation for months now and there is a class every Tuesday right up the street from me. When I was in Taiwan last month our group spent an afternoon at one of the most beautiful monasteries I've ever seen. It was high up in the mountains north of Khaosiung. It was raining that afternoon but that only led to a deeper sense of connection for me. I wanted to stay for days.
I don't really know anything about Buddhism but that day I promised myself that I would look into finding somewhere to learn more about medidation once I got settled in Chicago. And then just the other day, as I was remembering this promise in a Bobtail with Greg, I looked up to see a postcard for meditation classes right in my neighborhood. So 6:45 last night found me walking up Diversey by myself in my grey sweater and baggy jeans, little yellow flats. I let myself into the back room of a shop on North Clark where there were 12 or 15 people gathered for the class.
It was lovely and exactly what I needed. The hour and a half class began and ended with meditation and the middle focused on a lecture and discussion about cultivating a meditation practice, all led by an American Buddhist nun with a great sense of humor.
I liked the discussion on virtue most of all. The text for class, Eight Steps to Happiness by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, states that, "The first step towards changing our mind is to identify which states of mind produce happiness and which produce suffering. In Buddhism, states of mind that are conducive to peace and happiness are called 'virtuous minds,' whereas those that disturb our peace and cause us suffering are called 'delusions.' We have many different types of delusions, such as desirous attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, miserliness, and ignorance."
Now, I don't claim to know anything about Buddhism and I don't have any plans to necessarily become a Buddhist, but I do know that I agree with the above statements. This is what I've been working on all year...letting go of my negative thoughts, refusing to let myself focus on the ugly sides of situations and people and memories.
The more I've worked on this, the more time I've spent thinking about the positive aspects of things, the more time I've spent simply trying to be present, the more time I've spent thinking about all the things in my life that I'm grateful for and that I appreciate about my life, the better I've felt. And not just a little better...A LOT better.
So much better, in fact, that it's hard to look back on all the years I spent holding onto anger and resentment, judgement and dismay. I was constantly disappointed with my life and the people in it. I mean, not always, but I really spent a lot of time focusing on all the negative things about myself and the people around me.
Looking back I think it had a lot to do with a great deal of shame I was carrying around. Almost as if I couldn't let myself be happy. I was trying to explain this to Greg the other day, and I don't know if it made much sense, but for a long time after losing my parents I felt like it was my fault, like if only I'd been better they might not have died. I really felt, somewhere deep inside, that I must have done something wrong, that in some way I was undeserving of having such loving and wonderful parents.
And I think that's what led to so much of the negative energy I carried around with me, all the fear and disappointment and anger and shame. And it was when I finally able to let go of those things about myself that I was able to start letting go of them on an even larger level.
Okay, enough of Claire's deep thoughts on shame and meditation. It's only 10:30 on a Wednesday morning and there's a whole beautiful day out there to enjoy.
