About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend.
It wasn't a stalker sort of thing. It wasn't, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I wasn't feeling the least bit dissatisfied with the choices I've made. Quite the opposite in fact. Today is my and Mike's wedding anniversary (can it be just four years?), and the very fact that it seems fitting to write about googling an old boyfriend on my wedding anniversary points up just how much the search told me about the wisdom and rightness of my choices in life.
The reason for my search was really just a warm and contented feeling of wondering what someone who truly is a good and kind person was up to. It was, I suspect, a symptom of how comfortably I'm settling into my life right now—slower, more self-contained, but so much more peaceful than what it was eighteen years ago when Sam and I met. (That gurgling sound you hear is me choking on the phrase "eighteen years.")
What I discovered about Sam wasn't so very surprising. It's what I discovered about myself that tickled and thrilled and made me smile.
Romancing the Twenty-Three-Year-Old
I met Sam a few months before I began law school, grudgingly, at Columbia University. It wasn't my first choice, but it was my best option, and I took the shuttle into New York for the weekend as a means of generating something that might be called excitement for this new chapter in my life. Quite apparently, I had not yet learned to follow my heart or I might have stopped to question why I was forcing myself to go through with a choice that deposited a distinct kernel of panic in my core.
Sam did not, I am happy to report, go to Columbia Law School. I know for a fact that that was much of the comfort he provided me—a safe haven in Hoboken, a break from the rabid First Year discussions of broken marriage contracts, collapsing scales on train platforms, and whether a court in Wisconsin has personal jurisdiction over a defendant in California. (Generations of former Civil Procedure students—including the ones I taught during my brief professoring stint—are shivering in fear upon hearing the term "personal jurisdiction.")
We lasted two and a half years, just one semester shy of my graduation and one semester into his MBA program in Chicago.
It wasn't the distance that did us in. It was the lack of distance he planned to provide between me and the life I had been living for two and a half years.
I couldn't quite articulate it at the time. Instead, I cruelly judged his desire to take over his father's business in New Jersey. I asked him whether he couldn't see his way clear to living further away from Manhattan, which had shaken and bruised and disoriented me with its barrage of action. I wondered, somewhere deep and unspoken and plainly, in retrospect, coming from my heart, whether he was right that we, not our circumstances, create our moods, as if I should be able to feel better about myself by embracing law school instead of struggling against it.
So I was the one who finalized the split I had been teasing along by picking fights, pouting over his lack of devotion, and pushing for an engagement that we both knew required more thought and experience. I wonder if I would have been so willing to do what my heart cried out for if I had known that a FULL DECADE would pass before I met another man who was so much as a long-term dating prospect, much less a marriage one.
It was, I now see, the first time my heart won out over my head, and I didn't fully realize what was happening. I knew I didn't want to stay in New York. I knew I needed more support than a promise that if only I wanted to be happy I would be. And something vague and gray and mesh-like in the back of my brain grasped at the feeling that I wouldn't move forward if I married him, that I'd be trapped in something that had followed me my whole life.
So I ended it. I moved to Washington, DC, practiced law for three years, and ditched practice for more school. I taught law while studying for a Ph.D., quit the Ph.D. program, and taught law full time. Living in St. Louis, teaching law, I discovered yoga. I became a yoga teacher. And, finally, my path became clear: I quit to become a writer, I met Mike, I moved to Los Angeles with him, and life kept changing.
And last week, on the still shifting ground of the life my heart has brought me to, I decided to google Sam.
I'd tried it before, but his name is not exactly uncommon, and he was lost in a catalog of others with the same name, so many I couldn't begin to pick him out of the crowd. But this time I employed a modicum of cleverness, a soupcon of fixation, and I found him. President, as he had wanted all along, of his father's marketing company.
And here's where the tickle of self-discovery floated through me. Sam wrote of how his company helps businesses distinguish their product on a supermarket store shelf full of similar products, and I experienced that displacement I now feel whenever I walk into a supermarket. The few times I have wandered the aisles of Asheville's local supermarket chain I have shrunk from the array of pre-packaged, nutrition-stripped, sodium-laden foodstuffs available. I have found myself scurrying to the safety of the "Organic" signs hanging above small clusters of items huddled together in each aisle, purchasing jugs of organic goddess dressing and gummy organic granola that no one in my house would end up eating. And the next time I have needed to buy food for my family I have streaked for the safety of the all-natural grocery store.
It was in my own transformation from someone who wouldn't think twice about shopping at the supermarket for boxes of mac and cheese made with powdered orange cheese packets and for pesticide-supported produce and liter upon liter of diet soda that I saw just how wisely my heart steered me in those often lonely and painful ten years when I made my way, alone, toward the life I now live. It wasn't that I thought any less of Sam for what he does, truly. It was just that it was so very far from where I am—and I don't mean far from Trader Joe's (when you can get to one) and Earth Fare (where everything is pesticide-free).
What I saw, with a jolt, was that I once lived in that world. I was in law school because I lived in a world where people went to law school because they didn't know what else to do after college and planned to keep on living in it because I didn't know there was any choice (college, graduate school, while collar job in a secure profession, provide the same for children, retire in comfort, life over but perhaps not so much lived).
I didn't contact Sam. I still wish him well and want him to know I hope he's happy and that I am happy, finally, much more so than when he knew me.
But I didn't think I could really communicate all that across the space I've traveled, somehow, with a lot of help from the Universe, with a lot of luck, and with so much to be grateful for.
How Much of Who We Were Are We Still?
I turned away again from holding hands with the person I used to be the other day, when I received an email from an old college friend.
He, too, is someone I sort of dated, a different me, confused in ways I didn't appreciate and therefore rather aggressive about the life I thought I was embracing. For a year or so we didn't date—something about, oh, me throwing over his fraternity brother who, relieved at finally being a sophomore, had moved in quickly on my newly-arrived-at-college freshman woman before I figured out that the pickins' were a great deal better in college than they had been in high school. When he did decide enough time had passed since that mortifying moment when I traipsed into his dorm room on a Saturday night to find him counseling his fraternity brother through the pain I had caused, he invited me to a fraternity formal. And told me, quite memorably, that the reason most of the guys at Brown dated the women who bussed in for the weekends from then-all-female Wheaton College in search of their M.R.S. degree was that, "We know a girl from Wheaton will follow us wherever we go. Brown women like you are so challenging."
Our relationship was, from that moment, doomed, since I was so aggressively challenging, and proud of it. But after he graduated at the end of that year, he occasionally returned to campus just as I was suffering some form of heartbreak and needed the pick-me-up of a no-strings-attached admirer. Even after I left college, he continued to step into my life from time to time to remind me that—even after the Sam break-up—I was desirable.
So the other day came the email from him. In which he explained the "shock" he had experienced upon learning that I—the Los Angeles Woman—had moved to North Carolina.
"Shocked?!" I thought. "What right does he have to be shocked?" I felt as if my past was holding me in a tight, suffocating bear hug. As if anyone who knew me then was only going to insist that the gal who drank cosmos because she liked the look of the martini glass and did a whole lot of clothes shopping because it made her feel better about herself and preferred an hour on the Stairmaster to anything that looked like yoga still existed. The very idea makes me feel a little bit of anger and a lot of panic.
The thing is, no one is keeping me from being who I am. They may not understand (because they're not Kali, who has stayed with me through the changes, encouraged and admired and applauded and understood them). They may even, not so surprisingly, find my choices puzzling. Who on earth would give up a successful beginning as a highly paid lawyer at a highly respected DC firm only to once again give up a promising career as a law school professor only to end up sitting in faded blue jeans and unwashed hair in front of her MacBook in a house in Asheville, North Carolina, occasionally writing legal briefs for an hourly fee that brings in about a tenth of what she'd be making if she had stuck it out with the DC firm?
And this, finally, brings me to my point (now that I've found it myself). Compassion.
I thought I was going to write about being in the moment and how who we are in the moment is made up in part of who we used to be. Or about following your heart. Or trust. Or the way the Universe carries us to the place we should be if only we let it, difficult as that may sometimes be.
But what I really need to write about is compassion.
Because I'm feeling angry at the old friends who confuse me with the person they used to know. I'm angry that they can't let go of that person. Angry that they can't understand—and therefore fully accept—who I am now. Angry that their concern for my well-being leads them to question my career, my marriage, my choice of home. Angry that they can be happy continuing on the path we used to share when I had to struggle and cry and fight and endure and feel so alone for so long to get to the path I'm on now.
Compassion allows us to love and accept people who may not even love and accept us. It opens our hearts, strengthens us, generates more love in a world that desperately needs all the love it can get. Compassion enables us to accept people whose choices are different from our own without feeling threatened by them. Even if they may feel threatened by the choices we have made.
Most of all, practicing compassion toward others allows us to practice compassion toward ourselves.
Right now, I think I shrink from encounters with the person I used to be because it still scares me that she is me. I can compare who I am now to who I was then—how happy I am now to how unhappy I was then—and feel satisfied and reassured in a way that reinforces my trust in myself and my heart. I can stave off the panic that comes from finding myself where I am now, with nothing to prove and no way to prove it, by remembering what it really felt like to go down the road that is tempting me.
But I'm not yet ready to embrace that person I was, to hold her in the bear hug I fear she still holds over me. I want to leave her in the distance. I mourn for her. I marvel in her strength. I feel more than a little bit of the pull still toward the things she thought would make her happy (financial security, an active social life, an awesome wardrobe in a respectable size). I feel gratitude to her for bringing me to where I am. But I can't quite feel the compassion necessary to embrace her as part of me.
Gratitude, however, is a short step away from compassion. I feel grateful for all that person did. And if I allow that gratitude to open my heart fully, without fear, I will, one day, feel compassion—acceptance, love, admiration—for who I once was. Because she is who made me the person I am now.
Compassion, Kindness, and Gratitude—Supported Fish Pose (Matsyasana)
Matsyasana, or fish pose, is one of my favorite asanas. It is a gentle back bend (and I do love my back bends) usually performed at the end of an asana practice, often immediately following sarvangasana (shoulder stand). You are, in other words, in a place where you feel safe, your heart is open, and there is joy in shining your love to the world—or at least the safe room where you have been practicing.
Here, I offer a supported matsyasana to incorporate a strong dose of compassion. Here is a chance to relax and feel lovely, where you don't have to put any effort into your practice beyond finding the time and a safe place for it. If you prefer to incorporate full matsyasana at the end of a practice, the benefits will be the same.
But if you just want to take a few minutes to practice some compassion, grab a bolster, find a quiet spot, and enjoy.
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