Fall is leaving us. I can see it from my window, the trees letting go of what they held so tightly only weeks ago, the reds and golds coming down without protest, without argument, because they were never meant to stay. I have come to believe this is the first lesson, and maybe the only one. Everything that begins will end. Not as punishment. Not as tragedy. As law.
I want to tell you a time I came to believe this, because I did not always believe it.
There was a season, not long ago, when the work was flowing and the doors were opening and I thought it would hold. It did not. And before that there was another season, a darker one, when I woke each day and imagined leaving this earth. I did this for weeks. I did this daily. I was certain, the way only the suffering can be certain, that the weight would never lift, that this was not a season at all but the permanent climate of my life. It grew heavy enough that I went looking for medical help, which is its own kind of confession, an admission that the mind had carried me past what I could carry alone.
Shout out to Elizabeth Gilbert’s “All The Way to the River” for helping me with that one.
I am telling you this because I am happy now. I say that plainly, and I say it carefully, because I have not been able to say it in years. I am taking new vitamins, new nutrients. I sit with a therapist. I lean on my friends, my groups, and new people who have somehow become part of the architecture of my days. And I am watching my sons become preteens. When they were tiny babies, I could not imagine them as they are now. But here they are. The babies ended. The boys began.
Even my face is changing. Moles are rising on it, small and dark, like punctuation I did not choose. In my high school band at Booker T. WAshington High in Norfolk Virginia, (BT SOULJAZ, L.O.D. - YKIYK), they called me Babyface. I wonder sometimes what those same kids would call me now that I have moles and creases and a pooch, and I find that I do not mind the question.
You cannot see any of this while you are moving fast. Impermanence is not hidden from us. It is simply passed over. It is a pebble on the shoulder of the interstate, and we are doing 65, and if we see it at all we see it for a flicker, a smudge, gone. But stop the car. Get out. Stand on the gravel with the traffic roaring behind you and look down. The pebble is there, whole and clear, and it has always been there.
This is is impermanence in the presence of stillness.
Stillness is how we pull over. Stillness is permission not to respond, not to react, not to fill every silence with motion. And when we are still, the cycles begin to show themselves. They are easiest to see in the trees, in the turning of the seasons, in the slow changes of the body. They are harder to see everywhere else. But they are everywhere else.
Let me say something about the Blue Tsunami we just faced in the great USA.
Not long ago I believed we had entered a long night in this country. That the fascist, conservative, R********* powers would hold us down for a generation. Then ordinary people got together and voted their asses out. In the words of Rihana, “BLOP BLOP BLOP!” I carry real hope about what comes next. But I would be lying to you if I said I believed this new beginning was forever.
I can already see its ending, here, before it officially even starts in january.
This is not cynicism. Cynicism says the good will always rot and so nothing is worth doing. That is not what I am telling you. I am telling you about dharma, about the way of things. What rises falls. What falls rises again. It is in our breath. It is in our footsteps. It is in our children, our music, the clothes we wore and swore we would never wear again.
A friend asked me last night: if today is so fleeting, why do we keep making choices for today that we don’t know if they will serve us later?
I have carried his question before. And what I keep returning to is this. There is no tomorrow waiting for us somewhere, fully formed. There is no yesterday we can climb back inside. There is only today. Yesterday lives in today, in the body it shaped, in the memory it left. Tomorrow lives in today too, in the seeds we are planting or failing to plant. So the best thing I can do for the man I will become, and the best way I can honor or rectify or fix or forgive the man I was, is to be fully present as the man I am. Now.
Eckhart Tolle describes stress as
“the distance between where you are and where you want to be.”
I would put it this way: want to be where you are. Want your body as it is. Not the body you are promising yourself after the gym, the one you keep postponing your joy for. Not the body you once had, the one you keep pointing back to like a trophy on a shelf. This body. This one, here, now. Find a way to acknowledge it, to appreciate it. And where it hurts, where there is sadness, let yourself feel that too, because it is also what is here.
I have come to believe that all of our suffering comes from attachment, from the grasping, the clinging, the craving for some other life than the one we are in.
When we are old and want to be young, we suffer.
When we are broke and want to be rich, we suffer.
When we are on the mountain and want to be at the beach, we suffer.
When our babies are in diapers and we want them out of diapers, we suffer.
When it is 9 a.m. and we are already living in 5 p.m., we suffer.
But when it is 9 a.m. and I can be in love with what 9 a.m. holds, there is room for joy. When I am old and I can look in the mirror and see what is truly there, and honor it, there is room for joy. When I am on the mountain, I can love the mountain. And if I am on the long drive from the mountain to the beach, I can love every mile of it, every bend, every turn.
There is a myth of finding joy in out goals
I did not always know this. I spent years in corporate America chasing goals I believed would make me whole/happy/succesful/worthy/grown/sexy/desired/man. I sacrificed nearly every part of my life to reach them, and I saw nothing along the way, because I was not looking at the way, only at the end of it. My life became a series of peaks, each lasting perhaps a day. Then I would live off the memory. Look what I did. Look what I did. Nine months of misery for a moment that ended before it was ever real. Lookup my resume - you’ll see it for yourself. I wasn’t making friends, I wasn’t loving life, I was building for my future.
We do this everywhere. We sit with our friends and think about the friends we wish we had. We sit with our children and watch other people’s children on our social feeds. And so we become two people. There is the one who is actually here, in this body, in this room. And there is the other one, the one we are reaching for, clinging to, always just out of frame. That division, that duplicity, is where the stress lives. And the stress is where the suffering is born.
So the practice is to become one person. To see exactly who you are, when you are, why you are. And to want, with everything in you, to be exactly that.
This is the practice I offer you today. Thank you for walking this road with me.
Shabazz
P.S. I know I’ve been gone for a minute. A lot has happened. I’m showing art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I’ll be at Art Basel in Miami, December 1 through 6, showing at the Prism Art Fair, so if you’re there, come find me. I finished a bunch of commissions around Nashville. And I’ve been quietly working on my next book. More on that soon.
