OUT OF THE CLOSET

One basic law of gravity Isaac Newton evidently didn’t discover is that as that energy pushes relentlessly down, your waist pushes relentlessly out. I used to think this was divine retribution on men, since a pregnant woman has a swollen midriff only as long as nine months while they get to carry a big belly through years of middle and old age, delivering nothing in the end-- if you don’t count...um, noises. But it isn’t fair or funny that gravitas settles down on women so that our waist uncontrollably widens until we are no longer an hour glass but rather a Stonehenge monolith. The last thing I need is that kind of growth opportunity.

Yet ready or not here it is. The little button in my right hand has fallen a telltale half inch short of that little hole in my left and all the breath holding in the yoga canon doesn’t get it in there. Neither does giving up chocolate croissants to show the universe I am making some kind of compromise here, that I am a player. Gravity is a merciless opponent. While I was playing it killed three skirts and eight pairs of pants, three of them part of pants suits.

It’s mind boggling how something as seamingly little as a half-inch can matter so much. After years and years of carefully collecting—spending and getting, I have three closets packed with expensive clothes but absolutely nothing to wear. It’s going to cost such a small fortune and eat up so much time to re-upholster myself, I am having a fit that nothing fits.

Besides, I am quite used to my stuff. Some of my clothes have been with me for a long time. Having them hanging around is comforting for they are like old friends. That purple silk skirt was at my 50^th birthday dinner, those khaki pants were in Bhutan with me. How can I just throw them out? That red chemise dress from Manhattan days could come back in style any season now, maybe those fleece lined Maine jeans that got me through so many wet San Francisco winters will fit next month if I stop eating this one. I have a sweater that keeps reminding me I wore it when I sat through a snowy 30 day retreat in 1991. I have jackets I can’t bear to part with because the fabrics are so exquisite and the tailoring so elegant you can’t replace them in this era of quick sewn crap.

In truth, I have so many hangers-on on the hangers in my closets, it’s almost as choking tight in those hope chests as my clothes are on me. But also in truth I have kept stuff through thin and thick in case of a fashion emergency. I never know who I will need to be and fear I won’t have the proper props to be it. I stagger out of bed every morning, stare in the mirror and trigger a crise de couture. Who do I feel like today? What should I look like? Intimidating? Simplified? Expensive? Suburban colorful or downtown black? Whimsical? Comfortable? My age, whatever that looks like? When society says clothes make the woman you can’t do one guise fits all. There is so much more to pull together than just a top and bottom that it’s always a struggle to dress —you know, for success. Every morning is a Halloween put on for a day of trick or treat put on so you’ve got to get it just right. Be all you can look like.

Sometimes I remember an older woman I met years ago who confessed she had stayed in the military after World War II partly because having an assigned uniform spared her wasting time agonizing in the morning over what to wear. She hated that. I hate that --which is one sneaky little reason I like to go into solitary retreat: it’s comic relief to wear whatever I can grab without giving a hoot about aesthetics or approval because there’s nobody around to hoot. Throwing on checks with plaid or red with green and anything baggy is a good reminder of how profoundly opinion affects us and how great is the joy of letting go. But of course like everything else, reminders and joy and retreats are impermanent. I still have three closets jammed with killer clothes.

Among them I do have what my friend Nancy calls a “ reach-for.” This is a piece of clothing you instinctively reach for when you start to get dressed, something you could probably find blindfolded and will definitely grab to save the second someone hollers Fire! A reach-for is a no-brainer, dependably comfortable and thus comforting. It’s you! It’s right. It’s the mode juste. I tell myself I need to reach for a closet pared down to that kind of lived-in loveable, Linus blanket stuff. I need, as they say, to get down to the Zen of wardrobe. What needs to be coming soon to the closets nearest me is emptiness.

From time to time I have tried, as the late great writer E. B. White once put it, “to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone.” But I ended up as he did: “impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world.” I have sacked my closet, pillaged some of the no-fits, and dutifully carted them off to the nearest consignment shop where some were immediately rejected as not being up to the second a la mode or not having a fancy enough designer label. I must say it hurts when the clothes off your back fail an admittance test like that but it really stings when they are sent home after an eight-week enrollment because they failed to attract anyone’s attention. Sometimes I try to make the ignored feel better by putting them on again—if of course I can fit in--in a little rescue mission I call ”shopping for something new in my own closet.”

This makes clothes confusing. I sometimes feel smug about hanging on to things in the midst of a frenetic throw away society and righteous about flaunting something timelessly classic—and vintage-- to the slavish fashinistas out there on the streets. They are just so totally nouveau. Yet I do know it is profoundly cathartic to clean out your closets, to stop hanging on to what does not fit. Not having dead weight improves your feng shui; energy flow isn’t blocked. So the question is always: to free or not to free? To chi or not to chi? And how can you part with the skirt you wore on your 50^th birthday? Look at how many women still have their wedding dress.

This week I got motivated to find answers to those questions. I got ready to get really ruthless and throw out all I have outgrown, all that for one reason or another doesn’t fit. I was shamed into this because the American people suddenly made it look easy. In one election day they got rid of everything they don’t want on their back any more. They got a lot of people and attitudes out of the closet where they found out how badly these fit. Now there’s light and fresh air and space for new things that do not choke or cling. The American people had a Buddhist moment. They let go, moved on, lightened up. I knew it was my turn to get into outing.

I revved into toward Good Will mode and emptied my closets significantly — for me—getting rid of all that stuff I was saving for a strainy day, all the stuff I know, if I will only admit it, is never going to close around my waist again even if I totally avoid chocolate croissants ‘til death do us part. I realized I have been holding onto this idea that I am going eventually to get my teenage waistline back the way George W. Bush is holding on to the idea that he is going to make Iraq look like a Western democracy. I have been holding on to memories and souvenirs of events that are now irrelevant and will not be reproduced, attachments that may have blinded and yoked me to keep me from moving forward without stumbling. I faced up to the fact that I really do not need those khaki pants to get me back to Bhutan.

I have to go with the flow and let clothes go just the way I have to keep cleaning out the old attitudes and neurotic patterns hanging in my mind. After all, it’s quite possible, indeed, it’s probable that yesterday’s ideas will not fit today’s happenings because thoughts, perceptions and attitudes eventually get as stale, moldy and shrunken as bread. And that’s Dharma for you: paring down to the Zen of them. One advice fits all: there is no instant replay, no second time around, no point in hanging on to what’s hanging around because outgrowing is inevitable and it is normal. As Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche put it: Whatever makes you feel secure—money, honors, ideas, clothes—will eventually make you very insecure because you will constantly be afraid of losing it. Even, I have to say, a waistline.

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