The Yankees just scored five runs in the top of the eleventh. That saddens me. Detroit has two outs--make that one out--left to score five, preferably six, runs against Rivera. Not to sound pessimistic, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. Aha, a ground ball to second...Yankees win. And I turn off the TV.
I'm sitting on my couch right now listening to the Vanessa Carlton album I just bought, pausing between each song to listen to see if Polar's coughing. Last time I checked he was lying at the bottom of the basement stairs and breathing all right. It's not the fact that he's going to die soon that hurts most sharply...I think I'm relatively good at accepting the inevitability and importance of death, especially for an eleven-and-a-half-year-old dog. What's painful is when I hear or see him so uncomfortable, and I have visions of him going into a coughing fit, raspy breathing, getting worse and worse, looking at me with that hopeful, pleading, scared expression of his, like just because I'm the Mistress of the Milkbone Dog Treats, a magic being who controls food, water, and dog doors, I should be able to solve this for him, but I can't, until finally he just can't breathe anymore and his last moments are spent terrified and gasping for breath. That's the thought that makes my chest tighten. I suppose that's why people go for euthansia, because then at least his last moments can seem more pleasant. And if he really seemed to be in obvious distress and fear and misery all the time, I think I would be okay with that. But he's not like that yet. I'm just scared of not being able to make him happy and comfortable.
The central idea of my philosophy of life--not to sound really pretentious or something, having a "philosophy of life"--is something about appreciating things that don't seem on the surface to be "good". I feel like whenever I try to explain this idea to anyone, either it comes out sounding really obvious and trite, or it just comes out sounding confusing. And yet, I don't think it's trite, or at least if it's trite, I think it's important enough to deserve being said anyway. In so many ways, in so many conversations I've had, in so many situations, every seems to circle to this same idea. I feel limited by language, words like "good" and "bad", because they make such a dichotomy; I try to say "things that are bad are also good", but because of how our idea of those words works, it's like there has to be a choice...and I don't mean to be saying things that are sad and painful are
really good, in a way that wipes out to pain, and I don't mean to sound like Calvin's dad, talking about "building character" by suffering hardship. But more and more I believe that there's a class of emotions that have their deepest root in a feeling of love, and that root is more important than the "positive" or "negative" aspect of the emotion. If I didn't love Polar, I wouldn't feel sad that he's sick, I wouldn't cry, I wouldn't worry about him, I wouldn't be at the animal hospital at two in the morning two nights in a row exhausted and scared--and wouldn't that make things much more pleasant for me? But would it improve my life overall? Should I strive for it? Should I not have gotten dogs? Should I have guarded against actually loving them? I know this is indeed a cliche, that without sadness there isn't happiness, or something like that, but that's not quite what I mean. That way of putting it still seems to value the happiness as the reward you get for putting up with the sadness. And yes, feeling happy and giddy is much more fun than feeling sad and depressed...but if at the root you're happy and you have deep love in your life, then I think that both giddy moods and sad moods are equally enriching and important. As John McCutcheon says in a wonderful and admittedly rather sappy song:
And grief has a place at the table,
For it's part of what we're each made of,
And it'll stay long enough to remind us
Its mother is love.I just think that's so so important. I know some of the memories that make me feel happiest right now are memories of crying and being comforted. And I think, although I'm not really an expert, that people have a tendency sometimes to create extra anxiety, fear, worry, guilt, and so on, by believing that a "negative" emotion, like sadness, wistfulness, loss, is not just painful, but a problem in their life, something they need to work frantically to avoid or banish. And those meta-emotions don't have their root in love, but rather in fear of feeling sad, and I think they cause a lot more distress than the sadness itself.
Of course, I know I'm coming at all of this from an incredibly privileged point of view. My family gets along as well as anyone's I know, I have an amazing soulmate, wonderful friends, and I've never experienced something truly tragic. So it's all well and good for me to babble about how people shouldn't be so scared of sadness, right? *laughs* But I'm not claiming to know anything about the kind of pain that comes from something really tragic, something that isn't just a natural sadness of life--having a grandparent die is part of life, but having a child die, for example, is an extra hardship and I imagine much harder to deal with. I'm just talking about the sadness that's built into living: the deaths of older relatives or pets, the pain of seeing a child grow up and become less dependent, the pain of missing someone you love when you're far away, the pain of feeling rejected by someone you wish you could be closer to, the fear of becoming more independent, and so on. I just think it's so important to learn to appreciate those feelings, however hard they may be, as enriching and meaningful and beautiful, and to realize that they don't have to touch the core of your happiness.
Ready for a cliched metaphor? I happen to adore this one. I think it fits so well. If strong winds blow at a tree, the tree could be blown down...but it can protect itself one of two ways. It can be reinforced with ropes and wires and metal so that it can't possibly bend, that's one way. Or, it can have a strong enough trunk and roots that even if the wind blows the branches and leaves every which way, the tree is in no danger of falling. But the tree that stays up through outside reinforcement will always live in fear of the wind, and if anything ever cuts down the ropes, the tree becomes immediately vulnerable to falling. And I think it's so important to--in this metaphor--focus on helping your roots and trunk grow strong (that's a deep internal sense of happiness), and if you do that, you don't need to be afraid of wind (sadness, etc.). Of course I realize that cultivating a deep inner happiness is easier said than done. *laughs* But still, I certainly know people who seem to feel that anything painful or hard is a risk to, well, knock them down, and react to that by trying to avoid anything painful, or to bury their emotions (the ropes), and I really believe that's not going to work in the long run to keep them feeling happy. Of course, I sort of stole this metaphor from Paul, although I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking of this song when I thought of it:
Bend, little willow,
Wind's gonna blow you
Hard and cold tonight.
Life as it happens,
Nobody warns you...
Willow hold on tight.Well, Liz just got home from work, and I think this post is long enough, especially since I don't expect anyone to really read it. *laughs* Still, I do enjoy rambling. *grins*
Bye!!
