A year ago, sailing in the Caribbean during Easter Break was possible but so improbable that I couldn't have wrapped my head around it. I wouldn't have known the me that would have flown to the Virgin Islands, spent days and nights on a sail boat, let alone loved and loving. I flew to Alaska in February. I went to Santa Barbara. These were my edges and there so much life beyond them that I felt more island than continent. Six months ago, it would have been beyond my imagination. Even three months ago, when this was the course I set myself, it still seemed the stuff of dreams. And yet here I sat, watching this sunset with a man I loved deeply, on the boat I will call home. I felt like myself, but in some ways hardly recognized this woman who had moved so much out of the safety of her head and smack into her heart and into life. And it struck me, a believer in soul and in our essentials, that the Existentialists might have it right. While I can't quite give up my Platonic forms, I do think Sartre was right when he said, "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards." I was so sure I knew myself and here I was at the end of a line of unaccustomed actions, reconsidering everything I thought myself to be.
The mind is a great gift and a terrible burden. This sense of self, however it comes, through soul, through actions or perceptions, of merely in multiple brain systems independently churning away, making a space we call consciousness and imbue with personality, desires, hopes and dreams, gives us the awareness and the ability to contemplate our actions, give them meaning through story, place ourselves along the arrow of time. Yet it also limits us. We live so much in that space of self we forget that we can change, that in finding new wheres and hows, we ourselves can be reborn. Normandi Ellis, in her book Awakening Osiris, breathes life into the Egyptian Book of the Dead, fills it with a lyricism historians just can't seem to manage. She speaks of human becomings, suggesting that rather than being fixed, our essential nature and what the gods want of us, is an unfolding petal by petal, or story never done, not even in death. When I first read her translation in the late 80's, I found myself transformed by just this one thought, this sort of constant evolution of ourselves.
At the end of last year, I wasn't feeling much like I was becoming. I felt as if rigor mortis had set in and bit by bit I was calcifying, dying. Working again at the same place I started at the beginning of my career, living in the first house we bought, married to a man I knew well, cared for, but had no passion with for 18 years. I saw my life stretch before me narrow and fixed, my ending inevitable, my life growing smaller and smaller until it conformed to the dimensions of a coffin (yes a bit morbid, but your own near death experience and a parent's sudden passing within a short span, does tend to make one ponder endings and death perhaps a bit more deeply than he or she might do otherwise). And the thing was, I couldn't see how to get off this path, to open instead of close, to hold on to possibilities. I couldn't see how to make the end of my life as expansive as my beginnings were and it seemed, more and more, that this was the only right way for me to age. I wanted to die, whenever that was, saying yes to life instead of cowering and insisting another "no" in a long, long line of them.
So in November, on 11/11/11, at 11:11, amidst all the metaphysical hoopla that surrounded that date and time, I spoke aloud, "I'm ready life fir whatever you bring. I'm ready for love, to embrace life fully, to live and to live well. I'm ready." Now I'm of the camp that magic is just energy, that we set our intent, put will behind it, dare when opportunities come, and then see what unfolds. I think "magic" occurs when we decide to collaborate with life, not so much make lemonade out of lemons, but find ways to say yes and then to take action. Living the life of the mind is fine, but you can live and die there without ever living at all. Sartre wrote: “Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action." (There is no reality except in action.) and I have come to think he is right.
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl suggested that we take a more active role in life. Our expectations of life did not matter as much as life's expectations of us. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” I think I might have finally come to not just understand this with my mind, but to know deep in the soul and body of me, to live every day in collaboration with life, learning what it wants of me and then acting on that without fear, or at least with a little fear but determination. Which is how I ended up sitting on a sailboat named Susurru with the man I love, watching a Caribbean sunset, prepared to change my life completely to be the person I think life wants me to be, the kind of person that says yes, that even as my remaining years dwindle, still says yes with joy and an open heart. And I can say with complete certainty that this is just how and where I need to be.
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