letting go with grace

We've been in New York for a week now, on a three-week vacation that began ten days after we moved house. When this timeline is shared with friends and family, there's usually a chorus of disbelief. I guess it’s not very conventional to uproot your life and then take off for a cross-country trip. And yet, I feel, more or less…fine about it? About all of it: the move, the pregnancy, our parents getting older, Tom’s emergency appendectomy, our toddler’s expulsion from daycare—much of it converging in the same six-month period.

Because, what is the alternative, really?

I’m beginning to believe that the ability to remain with intense sensations, to stay present in the face of pain, is the only way to clarity, to aliveness—and then to peace.

When preparing for childbirth, one of the suggested exercises is to immerse your hand in a bowl of ice water or to hold ice cubes for minutes at a time. I’ve found that the pain becomes more bearable when you focus on it, when you let your mind embrace it. The body learns to transform resistance into peace.

Inadvertently, my approach to emotional pain has likewise been to allow myself to surrender to—to feel with my whole being—the feelings that comes up in the moment. When Tom was whisked away to the emergency room (by way of Waymo—a story for another time) and Claude was suggesting that he had had either a heart attack or an aorta aneurysm, I cried uncontrollably for two hours. Then, the next morning, life had moved on, as it always does and always has. The house was bafflingly devoid of signs of last night’s terror. The brazen Californian sun came through the kitchen windows. Eliot seemed both to understand and misunderstand the situation, waving around his yogurt-laden spoon and exclaiming that the policemen took daddy away in an ambulance (there was an ambulance, but no police). So, you wake up, gather your dignity, change your son out of his safari animals pajamas, prepare breakfast, and say to yourself, “aah, the machinations of life.” Because that’s what this—all of this—is, isn’t it? Illness and pain, glory and joy, life and death—all of it are but the machinations of this sweet and absurd waking dream.

Before we left Los Angeles, a friend introduced me to the phrase, “future spiraling”: the mind ruminates on a dreaded future, tracing and re-tracing the same anticipatory hypotheticals. I think a lot of us habitually imprison ourselves in this torture chamber. It’s human instinct to forecast, to plan, to try to exert control on a life that, at times, feels wholly incomprehensible. The illusion that we can succeed in doing so is the root of our greatest suffering. And some seasons of life can be ruthlessly disillusioning.

So many things are out of our control, like whether a storm grounds your flight or whether your womb becomes a home. There is a fluidity to life that refuses human intervention. The gods of luck and circumstance still govern our universe, whether we like it or not. Man is still merely man, despite the many myths of our own making, despite our tired attempts to become immortal.

A friend who had moved to New York from Los Angeles said to me that he’s been practicing “letting go with grace.” To me, this is the only sane approach. After all, this was all designed to be transient. Emotions, sensations, thoughts, impulses, inner wolds, flesh and bone, the things we are and the things we have.

Letting go with grace has now become my mantra for our present moment. In moving, we sold or gave away more of our belongings than we kept. What an immense sigh of relief that was. This isn’t something that works for everyone, but we want for our lives to be composed of experiences, of places, of people, and less of things. This has meant the ritualistic shedding of things, and sometimes, of people, year after year. This has meant the repeated calibration and definition of “enough,” for us as a family, and as individuals. I used to think that there was some agreed-upon metric system of “enough.” I spent much of my adult life trying to decipher it. But I’ve realized that enough isn’t something you discover, but something we decide for ourselves. Enough, I’ve found, is a wholly personal concept.

Returning to a place that I’d lived for nine years, a stone’s throw away from my high school and my parents, has been surreal. San Francisco feels the same. Some of the people I used to know wrestle with the same demons. Some people have grown, expanded their edges, found a semblance of peace. Some have faltered, defaulted to emotional avoidance, let their worlds become small and brittle. Increasingly, I think our lives are shaped by our willingness to surrender, to allow ourselves to be porous, to be altered—to lose what is not meant for us and to remain open to what emerges in its wake. And it’s fascinating, from an anthropological point of view, to observe and to wonder how we each arrived where we are.

I’ve spent much of my life bracing myself for something unknown. I grind my teeth at night. My neck and shoulders are a constellation of knots. I’ve indulged in regular massages since my early twenties, and every masseuse has told me some variation of “you are one of the tensest people I’ve ever touched and you can tolerate an ungodly amount of pain.”

I think I’ve begun to unclench, finally. I’ve begun to move my body more, to let life move through me, to respond with presence, with softness, first. I think. Because if life insists on changing, if pain insists on arriving, if children grow and bodies fall apart—what is the alternative, really?