Dream

I haven’t been at my best this week. My new schedule and new commute shaves an hour off my free time. I wouldn’t have thought one hour would make such a difference, but it’s been a really difficult transition. I feel like all my free time is spent feeding, clothing, and cleaning myself in preparation for my new upcoming cycle of non-free-time, which makes me wonder aloud what in the world I’m alive for.

I’ve been really being shitty at myself about this, slipping into absolutist thinking. Suddenly, not getting my lunch prepared in advance or messing up dinner isn’t just a shame, but this apocalyptic horror that will deprive me of all that I enjoy in life. Of course, when I do have free time, I tend to spend it watching movies in a disdainful , exhausted stupor and hating myself for not being more productive.

The other day, I was waiting for my bus when I saw a woman walking with her two children to the bus stop across the street. She was obviously in between errands, carrying big boxes of stuff, and tromping through the terrible sucking snow. Her youngest, a little boy, kept begging to carry something, and she was rooting through her box to find something light enough. Her oldest, a 4 or 5 year old girl, kept running ahead and shaking her butt at cars, announcing that she was dancing. The mom found something to hand the little boy, and he held it above his head like a trophy, stomping his little feet in the snow. I couldn’t help but smile at them, and wonder at the mysteries of being a parent, of watching these little things shout out their own individual personalities in every direction, and knowing that you somehow created those personalities. I could see, for a flash of a second, why parents talk about it all going by so fast; those kids were so cute, it didn’t seem like there could possibly be enough time in all the world to absorb everything they have to give. Someday that little girl will be in professional clothes walking down the street with professional adult face, and you will never see her wagging her butt at cars again. That will be a secret about her personality and true self that only you and she know. No wonder parents want to absorb every one of those moments for safe-keeping.

I usually spend my time at the bus stop sighing continuously, thinking about all the chores I have to do at home, and grieving the fact that it will be an hour till bedtime before I am able to sit down and do something that isn’t an errand. I was suddenly struck by the comparison of that mother and me. That mother was in between errands, like I was, and she probably wouldn’t get to sit down until well after bedtime. Free time? Yeah, right. And yet, she was having a pretty neat moment in life. It hit me like a thunderbolt: “No wonder I’m depressed if I keep telling myself that 90% of my life doesn’t count.” When I get fed up with having to eat, shower, work out, travel from one location to another, clean, dress, do laundry, I’m getting fed up because these are all the things I have to do before I can “live.” So maybe, I thought, I should change my definitions and my expectations. Maybe I should consider every moment that I am alive to be a moment where I am living. It sounds really simple, like, “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries,” but it hit me with a force that helped jar me out of my self-pity cycle.

Still, it didn’t jar me completely. By the time I got to bed that night, I was already in another tailspin of self-doubt and exhaustion and dissatisfaction. I was having trouble getting to sleep, continually replaying every chore I had to do tomorrow, and every wrong ever done me, and every wrong I’ve ever done. Finally, I tried a 12-step trick. I started thanking God. To clarify, I’m agnostic, but I sometimes use the term “God” as a convenient shorthand for “forces of the external universe and/or my internal hidden psyche that sometimes do not seem to be altogether chaotic or unaware, and from which I can learn things if I am listening.” The 12-step trick is to thank God for things you have and ought to be thankful for, but also to thank God for things you don’t have but are trying to get. For example, if you feel so angry at somebody you could slap them, you say, “Thank you, God, for giving me patience.” If you are walking around feeling like your life is worthless and no good, you say, “Thank you, God, for each moment I am alive.” If you really can’t dredge anything up, you thank God for every single thing you are doing. “Thank you, God, for this moment where I am brushing my hair.”

At a basic level, it replaces negative self-talk with a simple calming gratitude. I usually find something that I hadn’t realized before. For example, I had this one day where every little thing had gone wrong. At the end of the day, I locked my keys in my running car on one of the busiest streets in my city. My cell phone and wallet were also in my car. I was ready to scream and throw myself into traffic, so I immediately reverted from “one day at a time” to “one second at a time” to try and get me through. This one second I am not slitting my wrists. This one second, I am turning to walk towards these businesses. I do not know if they can help me, but in this one second, I will walk towards them instead of collapsing on the sidewalk and crying. I also started my internal retinue of thanks. Thank you, God, that today is warm and rainless. Thank you, God, that these businesses are far away and I have time to calm myself. Thank you, God, for my ability to thank. Thank you, God, for my ability to walk.

The fellows at the closest local business were very friendly, for which I gave thanks. They let me use their phone and phone book. I had a place that I’d called for locksmithing in the past, but the friendly guys insisted that I call the place they knew. That locksmith was the best, they said, and always very prompt and cheap and just really great, here, we’ll call for you, you just go watch your car. I felt like arguing, but I was already flustered, and they were very friendly, and I did want to go back and watch my car. So I let them call their guy, and while I was waiting, I paced up and down the street thinking up all sorts of new things to thank God for. The fact that I had eaten only an hour ago, so I wasn’t hungry. The fact that I had taken the extra time to use the restroom before getting in my car, so I didn’t have to piss like a racehorse. The fact that I had the money to afford a locksmith. The fact that I had repaired my car just recently so running idly for half an hour wouldn’t kill her.

When the locksmith arrived, he was a complete asshole. He was cheap, he did a fine job, but he was such a fucking jerk about it the whole time. I felt like throwing myself into traffic again – I just could not take more shit, I could not. So I took a deep breath and thanked God for my patience and calmness. Once the dude left and I was driving home, I was still on the verge of tears and madness, so I kept thinking of things to be thankful for. One thing I discovered is that the well never runs dry on thankfulness, much like it never runs dry on Everything Is Wrong when you’re in one of those moods. And while getting creative with my gratitude, I realized this had been a good lesson for me. When I was flustered and upset and the guys were so friendly but kind of pushy, I had really felt like I wanted to call my guy instead of theirs. I was hesitant and wary of their guy, for no real reason – I just wanted something I knew. But they were being so nice, and letting me use their phone, and my day had already been so hard, and there’s no reason to stick with the place I know, really, and I don’t want to offend them because I can’t handle it if they get mean, and yadda yadda… So I thanked God for showing me, yet again, that I am right to trust my intuition. No matter what else is piled on top of it, no matter how much a situation conspires to make one answer seem the simpler one, that doesn’t make it the answer I want or will accept. I thanked God for the illustration of how in all matters, big and small, with good people and bad people, I can and should trust my own gut.

So, sometimes the thankfulness thing can be a really good mental and zen-like exercise. I started it up the other night, and kept it on until I fell asleep.

While asleep, I dreamed I was a small child who had died somehow. I was innocent and good, so I went to Heaven. Heaven wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, it was exactly like the real world. The only difference was, God had taken care of everybody’s most basic needs, the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Nobody needed food, and nobody needed shelter. Everybody could have these things, if they wanted, but there was no need. There was no hunger or thirst, or pain or death from exposure to the elements. Beyond that, God left things up to us. There were rumors in Heaven that there were multiple Heavens, and in the upper levels, more pieces of the pyramid were taken care of. Above the level I was in, for example, nobody felt fear or pain anymore, so it was said. You had to earn your way up into those Heavens, and you had all the opportunity to do so by showing God how you could act when most of your baser motivations were removed, and when you lost the fear of lost time.

God didn’t hang around the Heavens or Earth very much. Though she was technically omnipresent and omniscient, she was also very busy, and didn’t have the time to muddle about in a lot of bullshit. If you managed something spectacular, it blipped on her radar. Being God, she found all sorts of things spectacular, from great feats of human ingenuity to a little kid suddenly discovering empathy, so there was no concern that you’d somehow “get your wings” and God wouldn’t notice. She just wouldn’t be around the whole time to hold your hand, or listen to you warbling.

The part of Heaven I entered first was like a big baseball field at nighttime. A bunch of little boys were playing a baseball game. They saw me and came over to say hi. Since I was a girl, they decided they had to try and impress me somehow. Since God wasn’t around all the time, she had left everybody with a sort of emergency defense system. If you said certain words in a certain way, a reserved “Wrath of God” spell would hit the spot you indicated, and God would arrive soon after. This was definitely for emergencies only, but the boys decided to show off by incurring the Wrath of God.

The Wrath of God was pretty exciting. The sky split with lightning, and something like a cross between a glowing chainsaw and a terrible, terrible finger hit the earth, splitting it into pieces. The baseball field was no more.

The boys and I bolted, knowing we were in deep shit. The boys had been the ones to do it, but I had encouraged and egged them on with a lot of, “You can’t call down God, you’re not cool enough,” and I knew somehow that would put me in as hot of water as they were in. We knew God was generally a nice God, but God was also an adult, and adults got punish-y when you touched things you ought not touch. Our fear was that God would send us to Hell, which was exactly like earth, but none of your needs are met, and all external forces attempt to hurt and depress you. It’s hard to keep yourself good in Hell, good enough to get back up to Earth or Heaven again, and of course it’s terribly sad the whole time.

When God finally arrived, she looked like a middle-aged social worker in a bad tweed suit. She found us hiding in the bushes – I mean, honestly, she was God, did we really expect some bushes would throw her? She was very angry, and very disappointed, but had us all explain to her what had happened and why we had done it. After all of that, she asked us how we now felt about it. Of course, we were all very sorry, because only now did we realize that we really could have hurt somebody, and we had ruined a field that people liked to play in. God softened after that and told us she had figured out how to fix it. From now on, we would be the child-watchers. When new children came into Heaven, it was our job to explain to them how things worked, so this sort of stunt wouldn’t happen again. If we did a really good job at that, we could consider ourselves forgiven, and we would probably really enjoy the new job, to boot.

When I woke up, I only considered it a generally nice dream. But as the day went on and I kept going back to it, I decided that maybe it had some sort of message encoded in it, some kind of “thank you” in response, if I would just listen properly. I eventually settled on this: God wants me to know that she’ll take care of food and shelter; I can leave that to her. My job is just to keep helping the kids. Also, God wants me to stop calling her down for all sorts of ridiculous shit, because she hasn’t got the time. I’m not the kind of person who prays that God gives me gold, or strike down my enemies. But when I get in a funk, I think pretty apocalyptic and wrathful thoughts about myself, who I should be, what I should do. I try to bring down the Wrath of God upon myself, because sometimes I hate myself that much. But that also implies that I think I’m that important and unique in all the world, that I can draw down that kind of punishment when and where I want it. Though it’s all entwined with self-hate, that’s still a very sick and self-centered arrogance, a way of showing off how very different my life is from everybody else’s.

So, I’ve tried to let go of a lot of things, which I think is what other people mean when they talk about “faith.” Whenever I see a house for sale and start thinking about how I’ll never ever get the money together to buy a house, my god, that’s so astronomically adult, I now stop myself and say, “God told me not to worry about that. God said she’d take care of it. Okay, God, you can have my anxiety.” Every time the grocery bill is bigger than I expected, and I start into a spiral about how I’ll never get ahead and have a 401k and college funds for future nonexistent children, I stop myself and say, “God told me not to worry about that. Okay, God, I give my most important possession — my fear and need for control — over to you. You can have the anxiety, though it’s really hard for me to give; I’m going to trust you and do like you told me.”

And in reality, I don’t have to worry about these things. I wish groceries didn’t cost so much, but I can still afford them easily, with only minimal dips into my luxury funds. I wish I lived in a better place, but I have lived in far, far worse places, and at times I am still very happy here. I want more than I have, but there are wants that are aspirations, goals, and dreams, and there are wants that are hateful condemnations of the life you currently live, and I overindulge in the latter. I want a house someday. I want enough money to buy and try new things, and support children, and buy the fancy retro red couch set in the vintage store window. I want a career I enjoy that will help me acquire these things. Those are goals, hopes, dreams, things that will be so awesome if and when they happen. But what I have instead is a job I like very much, an apartment that is sufficient, and a life that is still full of untapped possibility with all my “old” things, much less bringing in new ones. I obscure all that when I start thinking about how there is something wrong with me, or the world, that I don’t have more than what I’ve got.

So now I remind myself – very often, it seems, because I allowed myself a bad habit – that God told me not to worry about the basics. She’s got it covered. All I’ve got to worry about is helping the kids. I feel like my life has been cleaned out by this realization, all my guilt and obligations swept aside. I’ve been given permission to focus on the thing I really love doing very much, and it makes me want to laugh out loud that I was waiting for permission. So, thank you, God, for the ability to give, and thank you, God, for the ability to dream.