The Balance Beam

I’ve just moved from one container into another, with furnishings, fashions and food flowing behind me like the tide. In this new phase of my life’s downhill slide, I went from the equivalent of an open bay, a three-bedroom flat, into a tiny cove, 650 sq ft of a one-bedroom apartment. Before the moving van appeared, I expended what felt like thunderous energy as I tried to get rid of half my furniture, half my clothes and a quarter of my books—I never part with kitchen stuff. Yet despite the frenetic trips to three used bookstores and two clothing consignment shops, five thrift store drop-offs and a truck full for Home Consignment, I can only echo the lament of the late E.B. White at his attempt to move: I am awed by the unwillingness of my things to leave me. I am shocked, shocked, that nobody wanted what I have been clinging to for years as just too great to part with. There's emptiness for you: I look at the blue sweater with a furry black cat stretched across it from the chest to the back and see fabulous vintage fashion from a legendary Madison Avenue store while a fashionista looks at it and sees an old oddity so baggy nobody would be caught dead in it.

Sadly, even though I did bravely give to the thrift shop the cozy sweater I wore during my 30-day meditation retreat in the snowy winter of 1991, and even though I am selling at auction a painting I adore, and even after making two emergency runs to Goodwill--one with an Italian handbag shaped like a dachshund, I am still drowning in my own detritus. I have to keep pulling large framed prints away from the front of the cabinet to get to my files and office supplies. I am tripping over shoes that don’t fit in the closet, and I can’t sit in the upholstered chair because it’s cradling an antique lamp an old friend gave me for my first house from what had been his Bucks County antique shop.

I have enough dust balls to prove I am not a clean freak. But I suffer from such a strong sense of balance, or maybe feng shui, that whatever is not in its naturally inevitable place screams at me. I am so badly afflicted by aesthetic sense that I always walk into other people's homes or offices and right away start mentally re-arranging everything. I devise meals to get coherent colors and have been known to move flowers around and around in a vase until their colors and shapes cohere into a pleasing design like one on an artist’s canvas. I am so allergic to non-alignment that anything out of place causes an itchy mental rash that hogs all my energy and attention. That's why I spend way too much time standing puzzled in front of my closet trying to figure out which pants look best texture-wise and color-wise and of course style-wise with the sweater I feel like wearing because it feels like that day’s sweater. I can't help myself. Thus, in a small space that exaggerates clutter and crowding, I’ve spent the last weeks madly chasing the aha! moment, involved in a weird cross between musical chairs and a jigsaw puzzle. The floor lamp here…no there…the other room… the bookcase is too busy…the pitcher too tall for that spot…the plant too wide…you’re out!

In feathering this new nest, I have been so obsessed moving knickknacks and lamps and furniture around and around to achieve harmony-- my version of harmony of course, that I haven’t been to movies or museums or my favorite walking grounds. I have been to lots of home improvement and hardware stores though, certain this time, the third time, the shower curtain will finally be the right one: thick enough to not blow into the narrow tub and plain enough so its design doesn’t make the tiny bathroom too busy and claustrophobic. I’ve been back to the lamp store four times for a lampshade that might make that antique lamp fit in its new surroundings. I bought a $20 hook at the Container Store. It’s astonishing how free spending all this re-arranging has suddenly made the tightly budgeted me. I am that hard core gone.

The joke of course is that after passing Thanksgiving weekend in retreat in a shabby cabin with castoff furniture and no bathroom or kitchen, I have been trying to hold the satisfaction I found there. I remind myself how there wasn’t much happiness in the 9- bedroom Queen Anne mansion into which I was born or any of the Park Avenue duplexes I was a guest in. There evidently wasn’t any satisfaction in the huge Hamptons’ mansion where the picture perfect Christmas party I went to was being photographed for a national magazine, for by the time that magazine was published the following Christmas, the young photogenic couple was divorced and fighting over the beautiful blond children. The mega rich couple whose decorator spent $25,000 on knickknacks the day I catered their Maine housewarming was also divorced within a year. There was only the sorrow of sickness and separation in the borrowed Belgravia flat between the one for the royal family of some Emirate or other and the one for the Maharaja of Jaipur. Yet I found bliss in that makeshift waterless cabin where everything was the cheapest available and nothing matched anything.

Part of me was starting to sing "Can't get no satisfaction" and part to chastise myself when my right knee suddenly went bad. Not being able to walk was an enormous distraction. It made me stop yelling at myself for being dissatisfied and “spendy” and just get into bed. Since it was late afternoon and I wasn't sleepy, I decided to get more detritus off the nightstand by reading the book my Tibetan goddaughter gave me for Christmas. It was Sogyal Rinpoche’s Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying published back in 1995. And right up front as his entry for January 17, the actual day I moved, was this:

In Tibetan, the word for “body” is lü, which means “something you leave behind,” like baggage. Each time we say lü, it reminds us that we are only travelers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body. In Tibet, people did not distract themselves by spending all their time trying to make their external circumstances more comfortable …. Going on, as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction. Would people in their right mind think of fastidiously redecorating their hotel room every time they checked into one?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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