This Is So Cool

Who would have dreamed that I could reach new pits of darkness at my advanced age? A gal like me doesn’t even need death or destruction to set her off. Just garden variety loss: of structure and direction. Of friendship. Of objectives. Of sense of belonging. Of strength. I just don’t have enough bootstraps. Or rocks. What Dad used to call “that characteristic Ginna resolve” is below empty, with no filling station still in business.

I taught my first group of Burmese refugees earlier this week. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through, as I sit with them in their bare living room with neighbors and kids walking in and out at random.

I’m reading Turtle Feet by Nikolai Grozni, a Bulgarian man who lived as a Buddhist monk in India for several years, and then left the practice. Quite interesting. Here is one of many fascinating passages, about the moment he realized the incongruity of his life as a music student in Boston, and decided there was something more. I think it’s a succinctly poignant passage. Eleni thinks it’s ho-hum. You decide.

“Once I was in college, away from my parents and free to do as I chose, it was just a matter of time before my metaphysical proclivities came out and reorganized my reality. There were many turning points, but I remember one particularly well, perhaps because it was the first time I sensed that there were processes in my mind that I wasn’t quite aware of. I was sitting in Trident Bookstore on Newbury Street, right around the corner from Berklee College of Music, sipping tea and paging through a pocket edition of the Dhammapada. It was spring, the trees were blooming, and I was thinking about a pair of Dr. Martens that I’d seen in the window of the shoestore next door. “Lotus flowers, lions, horses, subdue the mind, don’t do this, do that“: all in all, the book was pretty boring and I often caught myself lifting my eyes to check out the girls from the New England Conservatory strutting by in a ballerina bounce, all of them dressed in tights, and with their hair up in a bun. Then I came across the line “Little spider, why are you afraid to leave your web?” and it suddenly occurred to me how incredible it was that, despite having free will, people were often incapable of altering the course of their lives or even straying from a purely circumstantial narrative. Who said I had to be a musician? Who said I had to go to class? What invisible force made people perform the exact same routine every day? What made people go back to their beds every night? In a world where some people didn’t live past thirty, and the entire human population was recycled every hundred years, there had to be something that could account for the widespread clinging to prefabricated narratives, or the universal penchant for repetition. I didn’t have to be the person everyone expected me to be. I didn’t have to work in the dishroom of the Berklee cafeteria four days a week. I didn’t have to go on a date with someone just because college students weren’t supposed to spend Friday night alone.

Two years later, I was still contemplating the idea of free will and identity, but on a different level… what would it take for me to disappear into the world… resigned to accept every kind of fate, including death, with absolute indifference.