Monday night. Getting a jump on tomorrow's blog because I've got a heavy day tomorrow. Just got in from singing at Petterino's. Sat with my singing friends and the place was packed in celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Cabaret show (called Monday Night Live) - lots of luminaries and professional singers. We all sang great - Judy and Bernie brought out some special material. Judy wrote a parody on "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and Bernie sang a song he wrote that was achingly lovely and even though he wrote it before his marriage to Judy, I'm sticking to the story that he wrote it for her!
Things are good at the frat house (that's what Madeleine's friends call my house now, given that I've got four young men living under my roof; the two tenants as well as Shay and Josh up in my unit in the two spare bedrooms). Somehow it got odd - the testerone imbalance around here. It's all I can do to enforce the "toilet seat down" rule. Shay especially struggles with that so I put a post-it note saying, "Dear Men, Toilet seat down!" It's affixed to the underside of the lid they lift to pee. Hey, a girl's got to enforce some standards in a male-heavy house. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink (or is that men, hmmm....)
Interesting today that there is not one article on 911 in the New York Times - it's my go-to place each morning for headlines and often inspiration for this blog. And even though it's not a major anniversary of the disaster that rocked our world eleven years ago, it seriously doesn't even get a by-line? So, a moment here in this blog to remember where you were and how your life was changed by that incident. I remember the initial rush for blood donations, the call went out to everyone so that the blood banks could be beefed up in anticipation of all the wounded, and then the horrifying, creeping realization that the blood wouldn't be needed after all. I didn't lose anyone that day but I did lose a chunk of my heart and I mourned like everyone else. Did you cry like I did, each and every day for months or did the event cause me to become uniquely unhinged? I remember hearing a snippet or anecdote on the news as I was driving and having to pull the car over and put my head down on the steering wheel to cry buckets of heaving tears - incapacitated. That was when I gave up the television - couldn't let anything, ever again penetrate me so deeply. Had to step back from humanity a bit and get my bearings. So today, love to all my fellow Americans and especially the fatherless and motherless children who may be struggling to grow in the shadow of their loss.
Read a great article by Brian Jay Stanley in the NYT this morning called, On Being Nothing. The article jumped out at me - ha ha!- as if it were written JUST FOR ME! which is funny and ironic for reasons you'll understand in a minute. And the reason this article caught my eye is because a central (and potentially depressing) theme of Landmark is that everything is meaningless. It's that whole French existential thing that, if you can't move beyond, will stop you in your tracks and paralyze you. But, in Landmark, once you grasp that life's events are random and meaningless, there is something to rejoice. It's then you realize your insignificance, the fact that your life is nothing more than a meaningless blip - and there is liberation in that fact. Frees you to get off the grid, put on shoes with wings and zoom around the planet, tasting this and that, doing this and that, simply enjoying the ride.
Brian Stanley is reaching the same conclusion in this article. He chronicles the awful loss of omnipotence he felt when he went off to college. "I was a king without any subjects. Arriving at college was like stepping out of the medieval world into the modern. The campus was a chaos of otherness with nothing at the center, least of all me. Unknown students from unknown places lived unknown lives, unconnected to mine. What did my actions matter anymore since no one was keeping track of me but me?"....I began noticing every small sign of my insignificance to others." He goes on to say, "Some days I feel so insubstantial that I am startled by signs of my visible presence in the world.."
I have a friend, years older than me, who like me, is a telecom consultant. For years we enjoyed each other's company on the phone, rejoicing in our uniqueness and congratulating each other on our brilliant and correct use of language - a self satisfied club of two people impressed with themselves and each other. As years progressed, I noticed, in public settings, he no longer felt the need to put himself forth. There would be a discussion with some young whippersnapper puffing himself up about something my friend was 10X the expert on. I would look at my friend, bemused, waiting for him to put the guy in his place - to show him up with his superior knowledge - take the spotlight, gain admiration. And I was amazed when my friend just sat quietly and let the other guy have the floor. It just didn't matter any more. He had arrived at a place where he had left his stories behind, realized his contribution was unnecessary, didn't care about admiration - he was allowing himself to try on a new role - spectator.
In the article, Stanley concludes with the most important of observations to anyone who struggles with a desire for recognition:
Society is adroit at disillusioning newcomers and many self-assured children grow up to be bitter adults. But bitterness, instead of a form of disillusionment, is really the refusal to give up your childhood illusions of importance. Ignored instead of welcomed by the world, you fault the world as blind and evil in order not to fault yourself as naive. Bitterness is a child's coddling narcissism within the context of an adults's harsh life. Instead, I know that the world only tramples me as a street crowd does an earthworm - not out of malice or stupidity, but because no one sees it. Thus my pain is not to feel wrongly slighted, but to feel rightly slighted.
There must be a Copernican revolution of the self. Instead of pointlessly cursing the sun to go around me, my chance of contentment is learning to orbit, being the world's audience instead of demanding the world be mine. If the world is a stage, then everyone's an extra, acting minor roles in simultaneous scenes in which no one has the lead. With so much happening, society is poorly made to satisfy pride, but well made to satisy interest, if we will only let go of our vanity and join the swirl of activity.Wow...there could be so many challenges today. Pick one or all. Take a moment to contemplate the anniversary of 911, remembering the bittersweetness of that event in American history. Bitter, obviously, but sweet, too, in that it galvanized us for a time. And maybe you see yourself in the article above - struggling with the idea that you are an earthworm. Time to embrace your earthworminess? Here's the link to the article .
Peace,
Sarah
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