There is Magic in the Mess
I had always thought I was tough. I never identified as sensitive. I didn’t cry very much, so I thought, and I never liked being bothered with what anyone thought of me. There’s a difference, though, between not caring what people think of me and not wanting to care what people think of me. I think I always cared. A whole lot. Maybe that’s because no matter how observant I was, I still saw all of life through my own eyes. That is to say, like how we humans once thought all the planets orbited around the Earth, I experience life through my own center of gravity, interpreting everyone else’s movements from the perspective of how they influence my own. I know that’s probably horribly selfish, but I think humans are selfish. And, try as I might to change, I think that point of view is one I subconsciously revert to, more often than not. I’m still working on it.
To me, the most peculiar aspect of my own sensitivity is that, as consumed as I can be with what others think about me, I’m infinitely more concerned with how I can live my life ambivalent to their expectations of me. I often wonder to myself, “who is they, anyway? Am I they?” Various philosophies would tell me that the ambiguous “they” is a function of my ego. I’d agree. And yet, in the purest of ways, I’m just so curious what people think. Why they think it. I want to get to the bottom of it. To go on listening–without judgment–to people discussing the people, places, ideas, and things that built them. I don’t think I do that selfishly. Although, I wonder if I just want to understand myself by means of understanding them. Like I’m some puzzle that can be pieced together by the nuggets of myself I discover in the people I encounter. Even now, as I write this, I’m thinking to myself, “I wonder what would so-and-so would have to say about this. Maybe I should share it with them.” I can’t tell if that means I am severed from my own intuition or if I think these ideas are particularly worth deliberating.
Anyways, I now think (ahem, know.) that I’m a deeply sensitive person. I practically cry out in pain at the idea of someone else hurting. It feels so heavy sometimes just picking up what’s weighing people down, but, I also pick up the good things, which is a blessing. I feel like everyone I have ever loved lives on within me rent-free. I think about an acquaintance and their particular major when I hear of an opportunity I think they’d find interesting. I still loyally harbor the secrets of my ex-best friend. I have poems dating back to middle school written for people I don’t even know anymore. I am constantly playing games of “connect the dots,” even though I know I can only control myself and it’s not my responsibility to play out the game-strategies of the lives of people I care about. But my mind drifts to thinking about them and their stories and their hurt and I think part of me sees the tangles in their plot lines, which I then want to sit and unravel until I can smooth everything out for them and tie up their lives into a neat, delicate bow. Maybe that’s what I am waiting for someone to come along and do for me? It’s laughably unrealistic, and, if I’m honest, not something I would consciously ever want, but perhaps it is what I crave underneath the surface. But maybe that’s where my obsession with perfectionism stems from; if I desperately want to “fix” the lives of everyone I love, part of me must believe I need fixing and see it as an act of radical self love to tweak myself enough until I’m optimized. I’m not against self-improvement, but I think I’ll just continue finding new problems. And, I wonder what I’d do if I reached self-pronounced perfection. Then what?
To quote a few passages from Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart that I read just after journaling the bones of this piece (hello, universe),
“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because, sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control.”
A friend of mine once told me I will have all the answers when I’m dead. So, when it’s put that way, I think being alive means being a little messy. If I successfully smoothed out my life and ran around neatly tying bows out of all my friends’ lives, what are we going to do? Sit there and say, “ah, look, everything is so perfect and beautiful”?? I think contentment would last all of five minutes before boredom set in, or a new bomb dropped in the form of a scandal or Covid outbreak or diagnosis, and then we would resume our tangled lives anyways. We’re not programmed for perfection. We’re programmed for survival. To pass on our DNA. To improve and diversify and evolve. I think part of how our world got so sick is that we’ve forgotten how to be human without all the bells and whistles. We’re trying to fine-tune ourselves the way we do machines; we’re maximizing output and optimizing productivity. Productivity, however, was a term coined during the Industrial Revolution to measure the efficiency of MACHINERY, not human beings. Our brains–evolutionarily speaking–cannot keep up with the exponential advancements we are making; humans can develop powerful technology far faster than they can understand its consequences. While social media makes it easier for us to be connected to people anywhere in the world, we are disconnected from our lives and observing epidemics of anxiety, stress, loneliness, apathy, and division. We need to find a way back to our nature. To simplicity. To what Buddhists call the basic wisdom mind. To the essence of life.
This point is furthered in another passage from Pema Chrödrön’s When Things Fall Apart,
“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. Death is holding on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.
We want to be perfect, but we just keep seeing our imperfections, and there is no room to get away from that, no exit, nowhere to run. That is when this sword towards into a flower. We stick with what we see, we feel what we feel, and from that we begin to connect with our own wisdom mind.”
I no longer think the answer to improving myself and/or my life involves preventing things in my life from falling apart; what will improve my life the most is embracing that things, inevitably, will fall apart. Over and over. And, each time crisis strikes, I have a divine opportunity: release the identity I was so comfortably hanging on to and see the world anew. The purpose of life is not to tie my–or anyone else’s–life into a beautiful, uncomplicated bow, but to let all the knots and tangles in the plot lines of my life extend out of me with stories of love and compassion, tying me to everyone I encounter throughout this human experience. There is magic–life–in the mess. There is togetherness in the mess. As Chödrön says, “we can give up on being perfect and experience each moment to its fullest.”
This line reminded me of a quote I love by Morgan Harper Nichols, “how liberating it is to pursue wholeness over perfection.” And, how liberating it is. A goal of mine as I enter 2022, is to continue pursuing wholeness over perfection. To chose presence over perfection; to expect honesty, authenticity, and compassion from myself and others, not perfection. To see the magic in the mess and the masterpiece that is my life, especially when things fall apart.