Present, Tense

I was coasting along on my bicycle today and decided to let go of the handlebars. I have always envied people who can pedal along with hands free. They look so confident and nonchalant. I’ve been riding a bike for many years now -- why has this simple trick eluded me? Maybe it’s because I never practice, so I decided to give it a shot. Before I could feel either confident or nonchalant, I veered to the right and fell over.

I had been going too slowly to do any serious damage, but falling down scared me, and I felt shaky and precarious for a long time afterwards, way out of proportion to my mishap. I rode to the bluff overlooking the beach and stood there watching the waves, feeling my heart still pounding just a little faster than seemed normal, feeling quivery and fragile. It was another one of those days that generate a good deal of excitement around here: big waves rolling in, one after another. Sometimes I could see their glassy green undersides as they rose and fell. The sun felt warm, and I counted sixteen surfers in the nearest spot, and by all measures it was a glorious afternoon.

That’s when I began to realize that my jitteriness from falling had morphed into regular old anxiety. For starters, I was vaguely worried by the fact that the temperature was about 80 degrees. To be outdoors sweating in a tank top in January is certainly the stuff of dreams for a New York girl like me, but in my current frame of mind I found it disquieting. Then there was the matter of all these people coming and going and all this vehicle traffic. I felt crowded and defensive, and I know that takes audacity, but I’m trying to be truthful here – pick-up trucks, campers, young guys climbing out of big shiny SUVS – it makes me nervous.

Don’t even get me started on the bigger issues, the what-am-I-doing-about-it issues, or the questions of role and identity, or the unanswerable whys. My states of anxiety do not yield solutions. It’s just me reacting in a mindless way to a barrage of unsorted unsettling complexities. I suppose there are pharmaceutical remedies, but I keep thinking I’m more authentic if I ride it out. Then again, this diffuse and fruitless anxiety seems a sorry waste while wonders are unfolding all around me. Slow down, I tell myself. Look around. Today I thought about the wisdom of Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who died about a week ago. He’s the one who said this: If you could imagine the most incredible story ever, it would be less incredible than the story of being here.

He wrote too about how we often go through our days stressed and oblivious, caught up in the “religion of rush”. That’s me. Oh, that’s me. I'm just a little bit frantic, rushing around even when I don’t really have any reason to do so. (I’m basically RETIRED, for heaven’s sake.) But rushing is my routine pace. At the same time I’m always looking ahead to whatever looms next on the agenda…and worrying about it a lot. To steal a good line that unfortunately applies: I make coffee nervous.

Case in point: Last week I went to visit my mother in the assisted living facility, and that might be stressful even for a normal person, but it was a particularly tough visit. I was immediately confronted by a cluster of problems that needed to be dealt with, angered by the apparent indifference of the staff, and frustrated by my mother’s increasing bafflement and passivity. Where is your hearing aid? Why haven’t you told anyone about the eye infection? Why are you collecting empty sugar packets and moldy sandwiches? That sort of thing. What I had hoped would be a chance to take her for a pleasant outing abruptly turned into a time-consuming trek to the doctor’s office and other assorted hassles. My patience kept ebbing and my pace kept accelerating, and in the course of trying to keep up with me, my mother tripped over a concrete divider in a parking lot and fell to the ground, hitting her head (thankfully cushioned by her thick white hair) and her knee (thankfully protected by heavy denim slacks). It was a horrific moment. She began to moan and weep: “God punished me,” she said, over and over.

I thought about that incident when I fell off my bike today, echoing my mother’s fall. Maybe that’s partly why I reacted so strongly. I’d internalized the scare and the upset and the awful feeling afterwards that I hadn’t been very patient and I hadn’t been very kind. Now a few days later, I was the one on the ground. Well, at least I didn’t blame God. ‘God punished you,’ my mother used to yell if any of us kids fell down. ‘You shouldn’t have been running.’ It was weird to hear her applying the same reprimand to herself last week as she sat on the sidewalk in tears. And it was weird to lift her up and tend to her and reassure her as a mother might: ‘No. God isn’t punishing you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the one who shouldn’t have been walking so fast.’

I suppose there are layers of personal history in our reactions to everything that happens.

As for me, I believe I fell down this afternoon because I let go of the handlebars and lost my balance. (If God were to get involved at such a micro level, I actually think he’d be encouraging me in my quest to learn new tricks.) And I fell nicely -- I've got just one blue-black smudge of a bruise. But I felt oddly vulnerable nonetheless, and everything seemed ominous, even as I stood in the bright sunshine on the bluff by the ocean, that ugly panicky feeling skulking around like a sneaky coyote.

It's funny -- I used to come to the sea and say a prayer, and somewhere along the line I stopped doing that, and it’s true I don’t know what exactly I believe anymore, but today I'm thinking I should resurrect the ritual of my prayer. It was like opening a door whose hinges have since grown rusty. It was like listening to a long-forgotten silence. It was a drink of water and a deep breath. I have been missing it.

Yesterday I went to a photography exhibit called “Layers” by Kam Jacoby in the downstairs gallery at the Lompoc Museum. Kam made high resolution scans of historic Lompoc photographs, then took new pictures in the exact same locations, and meticulously transposed them in perfect alignment. A native of Lompoc, he felt a sense of his own history too in these images and places, lovingly recording the remnants of yesterday that somehow survive. Sometimes the pictures were taken a hundred years apart, so there were figures of people in 19th century attire looking like ghosts within a modern context or poised in front of a house that still stands, coexisting with the present like fading memories, poignant and ethereal, stopped in time.

Milling about the gallery, I saw lots of real life people too -- locals from Lompoc with their own layers of history here, as well as people I knew mostly from school and hadn’t seen in awhile. Often there came the question: ‘What have you been up to?’ To a friend named Nick I finally answered, ‘I don’t know’ and he said, ‘I can relate’ and I felt better.

I am trying to regain my balance, that’s what I’m up to. While trying to be of service. And trying to make sense of things somehow. But I am anxious and preoccupied (preoccupare: Italian verb to worry) and although I sometimes feel that I am accomplishing very little, I'm rushing like a fool and spinning my wheels, and if I don't slow down I may well miss the point.

I guess I’m full of quotes by other people today, and one by Paul Celan also comes to mind: ‘Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.’ I need to pay attention to the story I am in. I need to love this world as fully as I can before I am a ghostly memory transposed upon it. I need to find whatever motion or stillness equals prayer. And whether I choose to hold on or try letting go, it’s really okay. Falling is not a punishment.