Tag: imagination

Doing Time With Thelma And Louise

 

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I had a dream about my grandmother one night when I was about 17. She had been in decline for a long time, but still clung to the desire to stay in her home. My mother, her daughter, struggled with her for several years. It was about two years after that dream that she succumbed to multiple myeloma in a nursing facility, the very kind of place she didn’t want to be.

But back to the dream: it was evening, and my grandmother, wearing one of her old-lady rayon frocks, her gray hair in a hair net, was standing in the waves close to the shore. She was walking further and further out into the water. She was a slight figure, but her face was determined. One after another the waves would knock her over, and each time she would struggle back to her feet, only to be knocked down again. When she finally failed to get up, a group of rescuers at the shore went into the water to bring her back in. They carried her back, laid her down, except instead of my grandmother, the person was a young girl, one of my classmates, in fact, and as I gazed at her, I realized that it was me lying on the sand. And I knew with absolute certainty in that moment that nothing—not time, not age, nothing—separated me from the old woman who had disappeared in the waves.

The iconic ending to Thelma and Louise is a sublime moment of absolute freedom. Everything has closed in on them, but rather than obey the authorities and let themselves be taken, they choose to “keep going”—right over the edge of the Grand Canyon. It’s a beautiful sight, that Ford Thunderbird flying through the blue sky against the backdrop of one of nature’s marvels. They hang for a moment, suspended in midair, and of course we all know that within seconds their lives will be extinguished in a fiery crash. But there they are, at that moment, suspended.

What do you suppose is going through their minds? Do you think Louise is looking at Thelma, thinking “I wonder what she really thinks of me . . .”? Or maybe Thelma is asking herself, “Do these jeans make me look fat?” The very thought is ridiculous. At such a moment, there is no to-do list, no goals, no projects, no 5-year plan, nothing but the air and the space around them and the seat of the car against their bodies. And what would you say if I told you that all of us, at every moment, are in just that space, suspended in each instant, no before or after? That nothing, absolutely nothing, separates us from extinction other than thin air?

It’s impossible to put ourselves in such a frame in ordinary life, with so much else claiming our attention, not to mention the fact that we furiously resist any such insight out of self-protection. The Buddha once asked his monks how often they thought about death, and concluded with the admonition that they should all have their own death on their minds every single moment of the day. But who can stand to do that? I certainly can’t. Yet what the thought of our death does is release us from every petty concern we have, to leave us in infinite space as we sail effortlessly through the air.

One of my dharma friends suggested that whenever we feel frightened of something, the internal message is, “and then I will die.” So for me: “If I try to play my violin in front of even the smallest and most supportive audience, my bow arm will shake all over the strings and I won’t be able to play a damn thing, and everyone will know how scared I am and I’ll be ashamed . . . and then I will die.” So I stop playing altogether out of self-protection, to save my life (you can fill in the blanks with your phobia of choice). The shaking is part of the sympathetic nervous system’s flight-or-fight response, which is the body’s way of trying to save our life.

This is common knowledge, yet what gets submerged is the life-and-death peril we so often feel without realizing it. When someone cuts us off in traffic or when a colleague contradicts us in a meeting, that jolt of fury we feel is the sense of panic transformed into a fight response. I remember one evening when I was walking through a strange town after dark with my mother a man jumped out in front of us, opened his raincoat, and laughed out loud (he wasn’t even exposed, just trying to scare us). I immediately shoved my mother behind me, planted my feet on the ground, and raised my fists, my face contorted into a mask of rage. I didn’t even think.

Actually, being able to act without thinking, completely in the moment, is one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have. In that case, fear for my own life was banished by a powerful protective instinct. Many years ago I saw a young mother who lived in the apartment next to mine dive down an open well to rescue her toddler, who had wandered over and fallen in. Her husband dragged them out, shaking, saying, “I thought I’d lost both of them.” Prey animals cornered by much larger predators will turn on their attackers and often send them packing.

There is a thrill in such moments when a creature acts in complete abandon, all fear banished by the immediacy of the situation. Thelma and Louise are sailing through the air, putting their physical survival on the line in order to preserve something that matters more, their survival as free beings. Homer’s bloody epics are thrilling because of the heroes’ total abandonment to their freedom as warriors. These men despised fear and anyone who displayed it.

In ordinary life we can all be aware of moments of fearful constriction and moments of absolute freedom, when we lose our fear of death and realize perfect stillness, in the suspension of time.

The Three Characteristics: Suffering

Dukkha, “suffering” (also translated as “unsatisfactoriness”), is central to the Buddha’s teaching; in fact, he reputedly said, “I teach only suffering, and the end of suffering.” We’ve already encountered the role of suffering in the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha also appears as one of the three marks or characteristics of existence, permeating our lives and our surroundings through and through. There are things that please us, beguile us, hook us in; but none of these things satisfies.

When we’re young, we are full of plans for what we want to do with our lives. For most of us, these plans might include things like a career, marriage, children, a nice place to live, money to spend on necessities and a few luxuries, travel, hobbies, good food, nice clothes, and friends. Young people are encouraged by their families and teachers to look to the future and to consider their immediate difficulties to be transitory. I recall a conversation with my mother and one of her friends, during a time in my life when I didn’t fit in. “Some day,” they told me, “none of this will matter.” They were wrong: as I became an adult, the identity I formed in adolescence proved to be remarkably tenacious.

Enter the Buddha and his teachings regarding dukkha. One of my dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, has said that “the Buddha is not your friend.” Warm, rosy predictions of a brilliant life in samsara, the turning wheel of birth and death, are entirely unfounded. Some adults in our own culture might agree with him once we hit our midlife crisis, when we realize that our fond hopes in youth have not materialized; or maybe they have, but without bringing the happiness we had expected. People may be tempted to jump ship, make a career change or look for a new partner, or buy a new house or car they can’t really afford. It might work out in the short run, but letdown is inevitable.

From time to time I imagine my life as if it had been different in some significant way. Maybe I never had the stage fright, and would be able to perform in music ensembles without stress. Maybe I had the kind of systematic focus that would allow me to work an eight-hour day, go home and relax, engage in an enjoyable hobby, and then go to sleep without difficulty. Maybe I wasn’t plagued by the grandiose illusion that I needed a big, fat career, and so would never be constantly comparing myself to others, or feeling like a failure just doing a good job day in and day out. In other words, I imagine a life without dukkha.

This Other Laurel is still a meditator, I’ve decided. She gets up early, makes herself a cup of tea, maybe takes a brisk walk around the block, and then settles down for some cushion time. After work she heads to the meditation center for a half hour sit with a group before heading home. She also volunteers in her community (because of course, she has the energy for it). She lives simply but comfortably; she is not tempted to spend more than she earns. Is she married? Sometimes I imagine her as single, but it seems like a lonely life to me, so I give her my husband, except he’s the Other Husband, also free of dukkha.

I have found a place for this paragon to live, and have even imagined her car and her wardrobe. The entire fantasy seems to be an equivalent of the dreams I had as a young person, except instead of dreaming of my imaginary future, I dream of an imaginary past. But although I can see the outer trappings of this person’s life, I am unable to make sense of what lies within. I can only try to imagine the absence of things like stress, depression, boredom, regret, negative judgments, and anxiety, all the while knowing that it is impossible.

Traveling allows us to see other places, and imagine what life might be like for us if we lived there. We read novels or watch movies and television shows in order to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. Maybe we fall in love with one of the characters—the protagonist’s love interest, most likely—or imagine ourselves working in that person’s occupation. Such experiences help us to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a human in the world, to place ourselves in another person’s skin or context, which is an essential component of a moral education. Still, they can never be more than the product of our imaginings.

I have recently longed to move somewhere else, either to the city that is an hour’s drive from here or to a warmer climate, or maybe even out of the country altogether. These longings are accompanied by imaginings of Other Laurels living in Other Places with the Other Husband. Yet several years ago I looked out the kitchen window at the trees in my neighbor’s yard, and just realized, “This is it!” I laughed. It was so simple that I might not even have noticed. This is it, just this. This is all that is it. No other, no else. Just this.