Why do I drink?

Actually I think I've talked about this some, haven't I?  But I was thinking about it Saturday and then never wrote anything Saturday.  (Shame on me.)  Now it's Sunday evening, and I thought I'd knock this out quickly before turning in.

There are actually things I don't like about drinking.  I don't like that it makes me stupid.  (This is a pretty common complaint, I suspect.)  I don't like the woozy feeling when I try to walk, if I've really had a lot.  Also, if I drink when I'm tired it keeps me awake longer – and the more I drink, the more of a stimulant it is.  One glass of wine or beer will relax me; two will probably make me sleepy.  But much more than that and it starts working in the opposite direction.  And from time to time – a decade ago, when I drank far more than I do now – I used to have the terrifying experience of going to bed completely snockered and waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe.  Literally.  I'd try to move my lungs and nothing would happen.  I finally learned in those cases to roll over so I was no longer on my back – even to stand up, if I could – and make myself cough.  When I coughed, I would start to breathe again.  And I suppose it probably never lasted more than a few seconds.  (How long can a person go without breathing before brain damage sets in?)  But those few seconds were always very frightening.  That hasn't happened in many years.  The experience (and my figuring out that it was connected to overdoing the alcohol) was, in fact, one of the things that motivated me to cut way back.  Well, ... that and the time eight or ten years ago that Wife asked the boys, in all puzzlement, "Why is the teriyaki sauce in the freezer?" and I suddenly remembered that I had been cleaning up the night before after everyone else had gone to bed and the freezer had seemed like an eminently logical place to put a big jar of teriyaki sauce.  Yeah, actually that too was another sign it was time to cut back.

After hearing stories like these you might logically expect me to have cut out all alcohol permanently; but I haven't.  Why not?  Well, there are things I enjoy about it too.  I enjoy the astringency of alcohol on my tongue and in my mouth.  (I almost never touch mixed drinks or sweet drinks – nothing sweeter than wine or cider or brandy – and these days I generally don't even put ice or water in my spirits. So the astringency of the alcohol is something I can feel clearly.)  I enjoy the warm glow in my throat as it goes down.  And it eases a residual level of anxiety that is otherwise often with me.

I can't tell you what this anxiety is caused by, but I have learned other things about it over the years.  It is not equally strong all the time.  It tends to be stronger at night, when I go back to my apartment alone.  (But sometimes being alone in my apartment is a relief from social anxiety if I've been too much out among people, so it's not just that.)  It tends to be stronger if I have to go to work the next day.  It spikes if I have to spend time around Wife or my father.  Alcohol isn't the only thing that can mask it: so will food (though more fleetingly and not so thoroughly), so will reading (hence my tendency to pull down a book from my shelves and get lost in it ... "farting around" I believe I called it a couple days ago), and so will absorption in a task.  Interestingly, the act of typing one of these blog posts is often absorbing enough to make me forget all about the anxiety while I am doing it (or almost all) ... but the plan or prospect of writing such a post, the very thought of it, makes the anxiety spike briefly and suddenly.

Where does this anxiety manifest?  This is a question that my meditation teachers have said one should ask about any unpleasant emotion: where in the body is it, how large is it, is it warm or cold, and so on.  The idea is to become deeply aware of your feelings, so that in time you can understand where they come from and no longer be mastered by them.  Well, I feel the effects of the anxiety in the normal places you would expect: mostly as a constriction in my throat and another around my heart.  But it radiates originally from an isolated pinpoint inside my skull.  I can even tell you where.  On each side of my head, start at the tops of my ears and move straight up half an inch or an inch.  Draw a line through my skull connecting those two points.  Then halfway across that line is the precise spot that the anxiety emanates from: in the exact middle measuring from left to right, in the back if you measure front to back, and in the upper half as opposed to the lower.  Upper middle back of the skull.  That's the place.  And some time after I start to drink, after the warm glow in my throat begins to dissipate, I feel that spot get warm.  Another drink or two and it feels quite free.  And only then do I realize how much anxiety I have been carrying around and not noticing it, because only then do I set it down.

Probably if I got deeply enough into meditation practice I could figure out what causes this feeling.  Deeper still, and I could probably melt the spot without alcohol or food or distraction.  Thich Nhat Hanh's Fifth Mindfulness Training specifically counsels against losing yourself in consumption – of booze, drugs, or food, but he also includes shopping, entertainment, and the Internet as "drugs" that can be just as addictive as the more strictly pharmaceutical kind.  He counsels doing exactly what I've said here: figure out what it is you are trying to escape from, and then figure out how to escape from it without using any of those things.  I assume it's possible, because I hear people talk that way.

But I'n not that advanced.  So in the meantime, I still drink.  I watch how much I'm having, to make sure I put it down before I start doing stupid things.  I don't drink if I'm anywhere that there might be unpredictable things happening that I'll have to deal with.  I have learned to be scrupulously careful about things like that, so that it doesn't become a problem for me.  Never again do I want to wake up not breathing – never, never, never. 

I read somewhere a few years ago that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotalers, and so do even heavy drinkers – even after you factor in all the health problems that come from heavy drinking.  So if I wanted to be funny I could claim it's all for my health.  But then I remember a scene from the movie "The Big Chill" where one character claims: "Rationalizations are more important than sex. Have you ever tried to go a week without a rationalization?"

There are probably areas in my life where I delude myself by accident.  I don't want to do it on purpose.

Awareness of the body

One of the things I keep hearing about in meditation classes and practice is "awareness of the body".  It goes along with focussing on your breathing – in, out, in, out – and with letting all of the tension in your muscles relax as you ease into a meditative state.  "Awareness of the body" is such a routine phrase that I heard one fellow suggest that the standard Buddhist ideal of mindfulness could just as well be called "body-fulness".

A lot of the time when I hear teachers talk about meditation they seem to be speaking a kind of "Buddhist-ese" ... a jargon that sounds impressive but that I'd probably find I don't understand very well if you asked me to explain any of it in my own words.  So I'm always a little surprised when I find any of it showing up spontaneously in real life.  But tonight, for example, I was planning to go to the movies.  (It's Friday night as I type this, though I don't know what day it will be when it actually posts.)  There's a theater right next door to the big four-year college a half an hour out of town, and they are showing a picture I've never heard of before (but the paper made it sound good): "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."  (If any of you has seen it, let me know what you think.)  The movie starts at 10:00 pm, meaning that it will get out just before "Rocky Horror" starts.  (I said the theater was right next to a college, didn't I?)  So I had a spot of dinner, went to the gym for a desultory swim followed by a soak in the hot tub, and then headed out towards the theater.  I figured I'd stop at a Starbucks for some coffee and an Internet connection, pound out my Friday evening post (I was mulling the topic, "What do I actually want in a romantic partner?"), and then catch the movie.

Most of the way there I realized I didn't have any money with me, so I backtracked a little until I found a bank.  And as I stood at the ATM waiting for it to spit out a couple of twenties, I suddenly realized that I felt exhausted.  Was it the week?  All the bagels I ate at work today?  The hot tub?  I have no idea, but for a moment every muscle in my body felt tired.  Obviously I was going to have to have that coffee to make it through the movie, right?  I collected my cash and my card, got back into my car, put the key in the ignition ... and just stopped.  So many times over the months since I started meditating, I've heard the phrase "awareness of the body", or "mindfulness of the body".  And it was really obvious that my body was telling me it wanted to go home and go to bed.  So was I really going to force myself to stay up for another couple hours or more?  Wouldn't that end up feeling like some kind of violence against myself?  I sat there in the dark, weighing the exhaustion in my flesh against the fun-sounding one-paragraph review I'd read in the paper.  I sat there, remembering all the times I've been told to pay attention to my body.  I sat there, remembering also that it was just yesterday I wrote about what a crock of shit the idea of iron self-discipline is, ... how in my experience (these last two or three decades, at any rate) perpetrating violence against myself by forcing myself to do something I think I want to do invariably means that my body will get its revenge by sabotaging whatever other plans I have, kicking back at the last minute to read the collected Doonesbury cartoons of the last twenty years while blowing off all the great plans I've made for myself ... how I said clearly and somewhat crossly that the only way to control yourself is to submit to yourself, much as the only way we humans have learned to control Nature is by submitting to Natural laws rather than striving somehow quixotically to defy them.

I thought for a minute or two and then I drove back home.  I'm there now, typing this up before I forget it (and so I can say that I posted something on Friday).  But I'll still be in bed by the time the movie was going to start, or at any rate by the time the trailers are done.  Instead of walking back to my car past the line of students in their Frank N. Furter costumes I'll be blissfully snoozing when midnight rolls around.  I'll miss the movie – and it did sound fun – but my body will be happier for it tomorrow.

I don't claim I'm fundamentally any more enlightened than I was yesterday, nor even that I'm going to be consistent about this.  Hell, if I really listened closely to my body I'd probably stop drinking too, and then where would I be?  But it was interesting to watch myself from the outside, and to realize – if only this once and in a small way – that maybe I'd learned something good to know.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, last part

And finally, in conclusion, ....
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I suggest that you tell your therapist the whole story of your relationship with Wife.  Tell her about how you met, what the early years were like, how Wife’s behavior changed over the years.  Tell her about the incident with the kitchen knife when Son1 and Son2 were little.  Tell about the many affairs and about Boyfriend4.  Tell about Wife’s many episodes of taking her medications and drinking and passing out.  Tell about Son2 coping for and “parenting” Wife.  Tell about the many threats and accusations and about the dramatic suicide attempts.  Tell her about how you behaved in reaction to all this and about measures you took to protect yourself and the boys and to get free.  Tell your therapist everything from beginning to end.  This will be difficult and you won’t want to do it, so start with what you are able to tell her and go from there.

I may have told her some of this already … I forget what I have, and what I haven’t.  But I sent her this letter unedited.  Her reaction was not “Oh my God, she did what???”  Her reaction was, rather, “So how did all these things affect Debbie? Why did they matter to her? It seems like that one piece of the puzzle is missing.”  I described your story of going through four years of therapy and twelve-step work after separating from your husband, and only then coming to see things in a clearer perspective.  And I told her that you have suggested the same may be true for me.

Of course it might be.  We’ll have to see.  Her general comment, though, is that she tends to think there’s not only one way up the mountain.  Maybe my path is a different one, and will go by way of different steps than yours.  Not that she said she doesn’t want to hear any of this stuff … she’s willing to listen to anything I want to talk about.  But she did suggest that I should have an idea why a story matters before I start telling it, to make sure we are using the time productively.  And other than letting her know that these things happened – which I did in any event by sending her your letter – I’m not sure I can tell right now why it matters that she know all the details of how they happened.  Maybe I’m overlooking something, though.

I’m not sure where this leaves us.  Of course I’m never going to send this letter, so I could just stop here.  Maybe I will be able to think of a clever summary tomorrow morning.  I don’t have one right now.

I will always love you,

Hosea

Discipline? What's that?

Lately it seems like my self-discipline has gone to hell, although to be fair I'm not sure it was that much better even a few years ago.

A couple days ago I mentioned -- obliquely, so that none of you could really hold me to it [see how clever I am?] -- that I intended to write something in this blog every day.  Then I posted the multi-part reply to Debbie's letter, and said that even though it was spread across several days that didn't count.  So then I didn't post anything Wednesday ... or, if you count on Wednesday the post that I started Tuesday night, I didn't post Tuesday.  Maybe that one post counts for both, I don't know.  (It looks like I posted on Tuesday, but those were both written Monday night and queued up till I connected to the Internet Tuesday morning.)

Of course the question whether I post this day or that is pretty trivial.  It just nags at me because it was so recently that I decided I wanted to be better about this.  And it seem of a piece with other things I see myself doing.  I was going to get up at 5:00 this morning to get some stuff done.  Alarm went off at 5:00, I got up to take a leak, then re-set the alarm for 6:00.  Or last weekend, I had a shitload of things I was planning to do Sunday; so of course Sunday morning I lay around reading a book I've read a couple of times already, in years past.  I mean ... it's an interesting book and all, Sebastian Haffner's The Meaning of Hitler.  But why bother?  Why now?  I'm not in the middle of any kind of historical research.  The only reason I can think of is that it was a way to kill the morning in a relaxed and easy manner, thus forcing me to cancel about half the things on my to-do list (including my laundry).

And so on.

Why am I telling you this?  Shit, I don't know.  Confession, I suppose.  It's safe telling you all my faults because I don't have to look you in the eyes afterwards and you don't have to live with me.  Maybe if I can expatiate on these faults over here then it keeps me from having to recognize those faults over there, and all the while I can give myself credit for being open about my faults ... in a totally safe and risk-free way.  See, I'm courageous too, as well as honest and forthright.  Боже мой!  

Maybe a better question is, why can't I get my ass in gear to get done the things that I want to get done.  I do want to, right?  It's not like somebody else is making me do these things.  Wife's not handing me to-do lists.  I really did want to have clean clothes for the week, just as an example.  And while I don't remember what else I had planned for last Sunday, I'm sure that whatever it was I must really have wanted to do it.  

So why don't I?

I suppose the answer has to be that while I want to do this and that, I also want to spend a certain amount of leisure time farting around.  My enthusiastic plans don't take that into account, so when the time comes to execute them I say, "Aaah, the hell with it" and do something else instead.  Once upon a time I think I used to be better at forcing my nose to the grindstone.  Now, consciously or not, I seem to shrug and say, "Look, I'm over fifty. Whaddya gonna do about it?"

In some cases, the answer could be bad.  Right now at work I have a whole lot of stuff to get lined up looking pretty before the company faces a big audit next month.  I've started work on it all, but probably I should have started months ago.  Probably I need to figure out some good story to tell our auditor about why we're only halfway through all this crap when he gets here.  In some ways I think I've been spoiled by the fact that I can usually get away with spouting a line of very well-informed and highly intelligent bullshit: people figure I must know what I'm talking about, and so there must be good reasons why I haven't done whatever it is that I haven't done.  It's useful and all, because it keeps me employed and somebody's got to pay for all that expensive education the boys are getting.  But every time I get away with something like that it makes me more likely to figure I can get away with it again.  That's probably not a good cycle to encourage.

Now that I think about it, though, ....  If I can realize that part of what I really want is leisure time, and if I can understand that I want it badly enough I'm willing to disrupt any other plans I've made in order to grab it, then maybe I can actually make a point of planning it into my day, or my week.  I wonder if that would help?  I wonder if I could talk myself into buckling down and getting this done now, on the grounds that I know for a fact I'll let myself goof off at this time later?  Since all self-discipline really involves various levels of self-manipulation*, maybe I can get myself to fall for this.  Or at least it's worth a try.

I remember years and years ago, reading a book by Jon Elster about imperfect rationality, where he specifically considered the case where I want X now, but I know that later on I will want Y instead.  So if I can't have both and I really want X now, is there some way to constrain myself so I can't go after Y later, even though by then I will have changed my mind about what I want?  The whole thing came back to me as I was thinking about my alarm clock this morning: last night I wanted to get stuff done this morning, but by morning what I really wanted was more sleep.  (When I say "the whole thing" I don't mean any of his technical analysis, none of which I really understood all that well even thirty years ago when I read it. But I remembered the examples he used, and took time away from finishing this blog post to go browse the Internet until I could find the man's name again and a reference to the book. See how this works? It's insidious ....)

I've probably figured out as much as I need to figure out with this post.  Maybe I should shut up now.  See ya ....
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* I'm quite serious about identifying self-discipline with informed, intelligent self-manipulation.  I remember a story my father once told me that just disgusted me with his lack of self-control (I assume he was trying for a different kind of effect), but I realized even at the time that what I mean by "self-control" was really "self-understanding".  The story was all about one time when he and my Mom were young marrieds and I was just a baby.  He had had to be out of town for a couple of weeks, and so when he came back and my Mom was trying to get his help with this and that (things he hadn't been there to do) he was totally incapable of paying attention or helping her because, as he put it, "I was so horny I honked."  They ended up fighting because of course she had been on her own for two weeks with a new baby, her nerves were frazzled, and at that precise instant she really wanted help more than she wanted sex, thank you very much.  Anyway, I didn't say anything to my Dad but what I was thinking was, "Dude, how could you be so inconsiderate? Jesus, don't you know that's what masturbation is for? So that you don't go crazy and can still function? Why the hell weren't you whacking off every night while you were gone, so that when you got back you could be sweet and helpful ... and then be ready for sex when she was finally ready instead of rushing things?"  I didn't say it, but I thought it.  And the key, from my point of view, is that "self-control" in this context did not mean for me some kind of violent self-mastery through an iron will.  No, it meant understanding yourself well enough to know what you have to do to set up conditions so that you will naturally act in the way you need to act.  If you are at risk of being too sexually demanding, it means whacking off enough that you can relax.  It categorically does not mean forcing yourself to be continent when every cell of your body is crying for release ... just for example ....


  

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 3

Continuing some more ....
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3. This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

This is the easiest one of all to deal with, because your interpretation is simply wrong.  Yes, my mother is very passive around my father, super-calm and non-reactive.  What you fail to see is that she is the active and competent one.  My father is the helpless one.  So if you want to compare my parents’ relationship with mine-and-Wife’s, it is wrong to see them both as cases of helpless women and active men.  The real parallel is that Wife is like my father and I’m like my mother.  It’s the same pattern, all right, but with the sex roles reversed.  The pattern is that one partner is loud, self-centered, belligerent, and helpless; while the other is quiet, passive, self-effacing, and gets things done.  What interested me so much about our relationship (yours and mine) is that you are like my mother.  You even look like her, a little bit.  So I did kind of wonder what it would be like in the long term, for the two of us to be together with each other … since we both fall on the same side of that equation.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 2

Continuing ....
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2.  A specific event that seems important… the morning we were going to drive from my place to visit your Aunt and Uncle. I was somewhat scattered and having trouble getting it together with my last packing to get out the door and go.  This little bit of chaotic behavior on my part triggered a full blown reactive response from you that lasted all day.  Yes, my behavior was irritating and even maddening, but your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the stimulus and seemed to be about more than just me.  In addition, you expressed that you had made a decision to just go with the flow and accommodate whatever I ended up doing, but in fact you seemed angry and reactive all day long.  The next day, you didn’t seem to remember much about what had happened and that suggests to me that you may have dissociated.
When I was little, I did this a lot: overreacted if things weren’t “right” according to how I per­ceived “right”.  Don’t know why, but I did.  Once my parents were going to divide a couple of doughnuts between me and my little brother, and I threw a big fit until they were divided exactly in half.  Then I gave him my half anyway because I wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat a doughnut.  So why did I throw the fit?  To this day I don’t know.

I’m aware of this tendency and try to control, repress, or defuse it.  That’s probably not a very Buddhist thing to do J but the habit is unattractive and causes suffering in me and others.  In any event this too has nothing to do with Wife.

In this particular case, I was thinking of how long the drive really was.  I knew it was a long drive – in fact, I had a pretty good idea how long it was, since I had made the exact same drive only a couple of months earlier.  I also remembered that when I made the trip in October I hadn’t left till noon, and I got into town about 10:00 pm.  Fortunately my other aunt and uncle [with whom I was staying that time] were still awake by then [I’m still talking about October], but it did seem to me kind of rude to show up that late [on this second trip, in January] if it were avoidable.  Besides, I knew that Aunt and Uncle were expecting you and me for dinner.  So as the clock got later and later, this is what was going through my mind.  I forgot to factor in that for the trip in October, when I left at noon, I was leaving from my place and not yours: this meant, naturally, that we had two hours more leeway than I was banking on.  On the other hand, I knew you wouldn’t want to drive the way I drove when I made the trip by myself, so already I had no idea how much extra time we would add simply by adhering to the posted speed limits.  And, as I say, I was worried about showing up late when we were expected for dinner.  An overreaction?  Yeah, sure.  But if we had been staying in a motel I wouldn’t have cared.  It wasn’t the time itself that caused me the anxiety, but what it would mean for the people who were waiting on us.  Of course I knew that they would make allowances, whatever happened.  But that’s because they are wonderful human beings, and I didn’t want to presume on their kindness because to do so would have ill repaid the hospitality they were showing us.

Then when we were finally ready and I went to move my car, I found I had gotten a parking ticket for parking on the street.  If we had left when I thought we were going to leave, I wouldn’t have.  OK, that wasn’t as big a deal as the rest of it, and by then I had already decided to accept whatever happened.  But it didn’t make me happier.

You say I felt angry during the drive out there.  From the inside that wasn’t it at all.  I felt ashamed of having made an issue of the time, and so I felt like I had to prove to you that I didn’t mean it.  I was scrupulously careful to drive no faster than the posted speed limit, and to offer you the wheel at every opportunity so you wouldn’t think I was insisting on controlling the drive.  Maybe I was angry at myself. 

More exactly, the interchange that bothered me was when I said – out of frustration, but not meaning it seriously – that we could make up the time if I did all the driving [because I drive a lot faster than Debbie does].  Then when I tried to assure you it was a joke, you wouldn’t accept the assurance and told me that you thought I really meant it.  At that point I felt trapped, because you wouldn’t let me apologize for some­thing that I really didn’t mean.  That was a behavior that Wife in particular did all the time … never allowing me to back up.  So anytime I said something stupid or clumsy or unskillful, I was stuck with it forever.  I could never just apologize and undo it.  Now we (you and I) had promised each other from the very beginning that we would always allow each other to apologize, to back up, to undo what we had said.  But it felt to me like that was exactly what you were not doing.  And that one moment – the moment where I felt that your unwillingness to forgive meant that I was forever, irredeemably guilty for something I didn’t even mean – was what poisoned the interchange for me.

That’s amazing: I didn’t think of it in terms of the promise you and I had made to each other until just now, as I was typing this.  When I discussed this with my therapist, the only part that I saw was the hyper-reactivity, which is as old as I am and which truly has nothing to do with Wife.  Only now do I see that the specific poisonous moment was the one I describe in the immediately preceding paragraph … and what made that moment so incredibly painful was indeed that it was exactly something she used to do all the time.

These two things seem to me to be related to living so many years with a person whose behavior was chaotic, unpredictable, often threatening and sometimes actually violent. Anyone would develop similar coping behaviors in the same circumstances, but they make me feel cautious.

How to be happy when you don't really exist

Several times today I found myself wondering what I would write about tonight [Tuesday] ... if indeed I could maintain the self-discipline to write something.  Maybe I would just talk about my day.  Maybe I would troll through my old notebooks looking for another alarming story.  Maybe I would take the advice I quoted in yesterday evening's post and use one of those topics ... an element of my autobiography, say (as if you haven't already heard way too much of that), or a word I don't know (not too many of those, comparatively speaking).

But at this point the only thing on my mind – besides that it's late, I'm tired, and I'm really enjoying my third drink of the evening – is a conversation I had in the parking lot after attending sangha this evening.  This is the sangha (meditation group) that I go to every Tuesday, the one that meets in the Unitarian church and that Debbie founded years ago.  I should probably refer to it as the UU (Unitarian Universalist) Sangha, when I need to give it a name.  Anyway, on the way out to the parking lot this evening I was making polite chit-chat with an Asian woman who is a member of the sangha.  She's a grandmother and still speaks with a thick accent; while I gather she has been in this country for many years, I gather also that she wasn't born here.

Anyway, we were talking about her car, and how something is wrong with her catalytic converter that is going to cost her a lot of money to fix.  And then suddenly I found myself listening to a long and intense speech about all the things that are going wrong in her life these days.  She doesn't like living here because she can't find a place she can afford, and besides everything is too spread out.  When she lived in San Francisco, things were a lot more compact, or at any rate she could get anywhere she needed to go quickly and by public transportation.  Here, not so much.  Also things are too expensive here: in San Francisco she could dine out cheaply, but here she has to pay more for lower quality food and can't find decent dim sum anywhere.  (Wait, ... what? Things cost less in San Francisco? Did I hear that right?)  Also, ... oh hell, the list went on and on.  I don't remember it all.  Some of it I could sympathize with.  But at other times I felt like saying, "Yes, and your point would be ...?"  Sure, this and that facet of living in this town are imperfect, but that's just how it is.  Not much anybody can do about it.

She laughed at herself that this was a very un-Buddhist attitude she was showing, because we're always hearing the advice (during dharma study) to let things be what they are and not to cling to our desires for them to be something else.  She's right, of course, but I figured it would be in bad taste to say so.  Instead I asked why she ever left San Francisco.  She told me it's because her son lives here, and so this way she can be closer to her son and see him regularly.  But then she added, a little wistfully, that of course he has his own life and isn't free to see her all that often.  So why doesn't she give up trying to live near her son, and move back to a city she likes better?  No, she can't do that because in the time she's been gone San Francisco has become too expensive.  (Aha, so in fact there are other reasons for staying here besides being close to her son ... viz., that this is what she can afford.)

After a while she wound down, and I was able to disconnect politely and drive home.  But I found myself thinking, God I hope I never become like that as I get older.  Of course there is something pharasiacal about saying "I'm glad I'm not like that poor beggar" and stopping there.  Also, I really did find a measure of compassion for her in the fact that she is in a situation she has no idea how to adapt to.  All the same, by about the third time that she said she finds it really hard to hold onto her identity these days – when she doesn't live in an Asian community and can't do any of the fun things she used to do – I found myself thinking, Wow, you're right, that really is an un-Buddhist thing to say.  Surely the Buddhist teaching would be that there is no such thing as your identity in the first place, that in fact you yourself as an independent entity don't really exist at all (strictly speaking), that what claims to be your independent self is just a temporary ripple on the surface of Consciousness like the splash when you throw a rock into the waves at the beach – a momentary configuration that will dissolve soon enough (since we all die) and reconfigure into something else.  If you believe in reincarnation then the argument is that you'll be reborn; but even if you don't, the molecules of your body will disperse into the world and become part of something else.  Great Caesar may be plugging a bung hole, for all we know.

[Somewhere in the middle of the preceding paragraph I stopped typing Tuesday night. Tiredness from the day and my third glass of wine collaborated to send me crashing into bed. I'm writing the rest of this over breakfast Wednesday morning, with the result that I'm going to be late to work. (sigh)]

Of course this is all fine as intellectual theory, or if you are committed to being a doctrinaire Buddhist.  I'm certainly not the latter – I enjoy the practice of meditation and I find the philosophy very consistent with directions my mind had already started walking down years ago, but I'm hardly a doctrinaire anything.  Considering how often I look at myself and just shake my head, I'm probably not even a doctrinarire Hosea-ist, whatever that might be.  So why do I care about this teaching of impermanence?  Why was I using it to justify my mentally criticizing or even judging this poor woman (also a pretty un-Buddhist thing to do!), even while I was nodding sympathetically on the outside and trying to say helpful things about the really unfortunate pickle she feels herself in?  Is it just that I've gotten allergic to hearing people complain (except myself, of course), and any excuse is good enough for dismissing somebody else's suffering?

Anything's possible, but I hope not.  More exactly, I'm singularly aware these days of just how impermanent this or that element of our identities can be.  Two years ago my identity had a lot to do with being a husband and father and homeowner; now, not so much.  What's more, there's something valuable in the ability to be happy regardless what is going on.  Even when things were truly miserable with Wife, there was a level on which I would have said I was happy.  It wasn't the whole story, by a long shot; but it wasn't just self-delusion or happy-talk, either.  It was more like ... ummm ... gosh, now that I try to put it into words I'm not quite sure how to do so without sounding glib or simplistic and it wasn't really any of those things either.  But let me say this.  There were times in the past when depression would get hold of me and I would wish I had never been born.  In the last decade or two, that never really happened.  There were times of anguish, times of hopelessness.  There were times I was furious at God or Providence or my own damned stupidity for landing me in what seemed an impossible situation.  There were times that I stared vacantly straight ahead, with no more idea what I was going to do next or how I was going to face tomorrow than I had of how to fly to the moon.  And yet, with all that – if you had asked me "Do you want to kill yourself?" there were only a small handful of moments (that left almost as soon as they had arrived) when I would have said Yes.  My considered opinion was always No.  If you had asked me the great George Bailey question from "It's a Wonderful Life" – would it have been bettter if I had never been born? – the answer would have been No.  And indeed I took a lot of comfort from George Bailey's exultant exclamation near the end of that movie, "I'm alive! Yippee! Hooray! I'm going to jail!"  I looked at George Bailey in the movie and conceded that yes, it was better for him to be alive even at the cost of being sent unjustly to jail.  Then I turned around to look at my own predicament and conceded that if he could be happy – and rightly so – even while being sent unjustly to jail, then I could be happy in my circumstances too.  If asked whether I would be willing to live my life over I could have honestly said, with Friedrich Nietzsche, that Yes I would be willing even if every single thing worked out the same way as it did before.  I don't think much of the Doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same as a philosophical doctrine; but as a moral aspiration (I mean, the aspiration to love the world so much that you can will the eternal return of your life, even if large parts of that life turn out horrifying, miserable, or just deeply regrettable) ... it's a good one.

I have no idea how to explain this to anybody else without sounding smug and self-satisfied and preachy.  I certainly won't try to explain it to my friend from sangha.  But I wish I could, because truly it might help her feel better.