Let Me Call You Sweetheart

A good, wise and wonderful friend of mine, who always seems to give me exactly what I need, when I need it, sent me the link this week to Krista Tippett’s program, On Being. On this segment, entitled What We Nourish, Krista interviews the Jewish, Buddhist, Mother and Grandmother, writer and therapist, Sylvia Boorstein.

The reason the timing for this was so perfect, was that I was finding myself engulfed in anxiety. I found myself unable to write, to unwind, to feel, well, that my life was working out as it should be. I have options, freedoms, choices, and responsibilities that are not lining up in the ways I thought they should, and it scares me, worries me.

It is also Easter, Passover, a holiday time, and I have found myself without a spiritual home, without others that I share a story with to makes sense of things. I have a longing to believe in the things and the ways I used to believe. I have a longing to dye Easter eggs with my children, like we did in the past, even though they are grown up now, and coloring eggs with their own children. I do not dye eggs for myself, so what do I do now? I need to find new rituals to help me feel grounded and move forward.

It was helpful to hear that Sylvia Boorstein shares my disposition towards anxiety, in what she calls, fretting. I do fret, and I kept thinking that with therapy, that with meditation, that with time, I would just stop fretting. It isn’t happening, at least not like I thought. I don’t have perfect equanimity, and my fretting can reach such proportions that my children sense it and it makes me feel like a parenting failure, like I can’t just be this perfect person my children can always trust to be safe, and sound, and wise and calm, and. . . I worry that it makes me unlovable.

But as Sylvia explained it, for some of us, when we are in doubt, we worry. And who can live without doubt in the world? She said, "I thought my private anxiety was mine." By her saying this, I found solace in not being alone in my anxiousness. She also noted, "I don’t want to sail above my emotional life." And I too, am working towards not separating from my emotional life, but wanting to live fully in my emotional life. I need to be willing to feel both my doubt, and my reaction to it. The kindest words that Sylvia shared in the interview were these (in practicing loving kindness to yourself), “Sweetheart, you’re in pain. Relax, take a breath.”

So, in listening to her, I will tell myself today to relax, take a breath. I will remember to be kind to myself, and remember to care in each moment, for myself, for others. I will be in this holiday weekend, in this spot of no longer believing in that which used to solace me, but believing in kindness, in my friends, in my family, in the power of the universe to carry me through doubt and indecision. There is no Easter bunny, and no one way to ease all the existential tension of life. But there is love, and there is kindness, and there is the unceasing unfolding of each new day. Their are friends, who know just what we need, when we need it. I need to trust in this, and not be mislead by the myth of perfection and certainty.