I can’t believe I am saying this, but now that I’ve been back in Seattle for more than a year, I think I miss Southern California.
I know that makes me a cliche, a walking billboard for the sales pitch “The grass is always greener . . .”
I could blame it on the U.S. Government, since moving around quite a bit is the signature of a military brat and I grew up in an Air Force family which moved around quite a bit. I could say my DNA was somehow re-written by that experience and that I have to move. I could say that moving — and her conjoined twin sister leaving — are an appendage to my being, just as the military duffel, in all it’s sickly green heft, is the third arm of any new recruit.
I lost count on how many places I’ve lived at around the 20 mark. That’s in my adult life. Strangely, almost every time, within a year of a move from any location, I find myself looking back on the left place with the rose colored glasses I used to carry in my pocket, but now wear around my neck on an old lady chain, afraid to lose them.
So it shouldn’t surprise me that here I am visiting the sandy beaches at the south end of the Golden State, listening to flocks of green parrots riot overhead, watching boom-box carrying roller skaters shimmy by, and realizing that the nearest rain cloud is at least 500 miles away. It should be no surprise that here I am, eating greasy delicious street tacos and thinking This is soooo GREAT!”
Which is the exact opposite of what I was thinking when I packed a rented minivan with the bare necessities for survival and rolled out of Los Angeles all those months ago practically weeping with glee for the leaving.
“I HATE this place,” I howled at my partner more than once. If you asked him, he’d say it was at least once a day.
LA was too hot, I whined. The people were too image-conscious. I was too old to fit into that kind of edgy and cool. I was too far from family. The streets were dirty. What they call green in that desert city would be called puke in any other part of the world. My knees hurt, it must be the weather. My dogs aren’t allowed, well, practically anywhere in LA. And so on.
And now here I am, suddenly standing under swaying palm trees on a nearly white sand beach, watching kite surfers fly through a cloudless sky and dogs frolic in the surf. Here I am with a comforting Long Beach breeze tickling my arms. Here I am with a frosty beer and a beach umbrella, reflecting back on having just come through a Seattle winter. A Seattle winter that was wet and gray and somber, during which I barely saw the family I said I was coming back for, and through most of which I was stuck inside trying to evade an invisible little bugger determined to aerosol itself into humans around the world.
Here I am thinking: “What was I thinking?”
I don’t have the answer to that. But I can tell you what I am thinking now.
Although I can come up with a whole list of useful justifications for why I run away from one place or person to another, the truth is, I’ve just never learned to stay.
When something, some place, or too close an emotional attachment makes me uncomfortable, my first inclination is to bolt like a bat outta hell. Rather than let the itch fade of its own accord, I have to scratch it ‘til it bleeds. Which usually entails a suitcase and a rental truck.
One of my beloved meditation-wisdom teachers is Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. I realize now that her description of why people like me pop up off their meditation cushions and flee the building speaks directly to my urge to get away, relocate, and start from scratch, AGAIN, rather than stay a course.
Today as I listen to Pema try to change my life through my earbuds and favorite audiobook app, I discover that she isn’t handing me my problem, she’s handing me my answer:
“Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it's impossible to stay. . . All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don't want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. The pithy instruction is, Stay...stay...just stay.
Ouch. Just ouch. She goes on:
Learning to stay the Master adds, just for me I am sure, is like “training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we'll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog. The dog may obey when we say, "Stay!" "Come!" "Roll over!" and "Sit up!" but he will also be neurotic and confused. By contrast, training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn't become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure.
Call me Rover.
I am that dog shying, tail-between-the-legs, from emotional discomfort, tied in knots by the anxiety of not knowing, fearful of my shadow and loud noises. And here it comes. The answer:
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay!. What's for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay! That is how we cultivate steadfastness.”
The lesson in lawns is loud and clear.
The grass is not greener here or there. It isn’t greener in any of the countries I’ve threatened to move to. It isn’t greener in another relationship. But, here or there or anywhere, in all relationships, and in all places the grass is green, then brown, then green again. It’s seasonal. All things are seasonal.
Here I stand next to a brilliant and bountiful bougainvillea in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary erected (incongruously) in front of a Buddhist monastery above a beach in Southern California. Here I am in the light of an orange-pink sunset coming to understand it was never LA or a relationship or any fill-in-the-blank complaint that I needed to get away from as I moved that minivan across a thousand miles.
It was myself.
It was my inability to sit in discomfort long enough for it to become something other, for it to evolve into something more, for it to, as Pema offers, teach me not just about myself but also about what it is to be human.
My leavings have never been about freeing myself. They have always been about the fear of being stuck where I am with who I am. And the truth is, there is nowhere where I can go that will ever get me away from that.
Here I am back in Seattle on a clear and glorious spring day, pushing the button on Audible, my book app. Here I am listening.
“When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy,” Pema reminds me. “We gradually learn not to fear it.”
Here I am settling in, running my toes through the grass, and seeing all its tones.
Click here to hear Pema Chodron's talk on learning to stay.
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