The other day, I was driving from my work to my MFA program. I took sidestreets and crossed a small bridge. Right when I got across the bridge, I crossed the railroad tracks, and went under the freeway. I was trying to maneuver my car with one hand as I talked on my cell phone to my friend, the dancer. We were having a conversation of a somewhat spiritual nature. I forget the exact details of our exchange but it was something along the lines of when how we have to learn how to be happy with what we have and not to strive too hard forgetting to live life. She was approaching the idea from an Eastern mystic philosophy that she is currently learning, and I was talking about my own spiritual practice with Eastern Christianity. So as I drove, we talked. I told her about my MFA program, and how I am distancing myself from it.
There’s something about when I step foot on my MFA program’s campus; I get very, very tired. I went there this weekend. I went there again on Monday. I went there again today. Each time, I came home and took a nap, I fell down in my bed, exhausted by the people there, by the surroundings, by the heaviness of being “done.” It’s a kind of narcoleptic effect. I go to mfa program. I come home and sleep.
This weekend at the MFA program conference, I had a lot of chatter conversations. Hi how are you, geez it’s been so long, blah blah blah. I saw my former close friend, who is consumed by her own envy and has since become an acquaintance, we made polite conversation that didn’t make much sense. I ended up feeling drained. Maybe it is the feeling of obsessive striving that I get from the people there. It’s not that they’re that bad. It’s just that there’s a collective pressure there, and it may be a pressure I have been operating under for a long time–so that is why it affects me. But–the pressure is something like striving and simultaneously seeing oneself as great without the necessary introspection.
My dancer friend, who’s becoming a yoga teacher, said that in yoga, they call that feelling “maya” or “illusion”. Maya is the term that I think, if I understand her right, is when falsehood and self-conceit rule a person. I feel like intertwined with this idea is the idea of people who are always striving for something, in a kind of blindly ambitious way. I think it’s something similar to the concept of “plani” in the Greek Orthodox Christian mystic tradition. It’s the idea that someone is so consumed by their own self-worth, that they believe beyond a doubt in themselves and that they are always right. The Orthodox spiritual fathers and mothers, coming also from an Eastern tradition, see plani as “delusion”, or to quote the book I am reading, Gifts of the Desrt by Kyriacos C. Markides, plani is more specifically, “an error of perception and cognition related to spiritual matters that undermines one’s ascent to God. A product of human imperfection.”
This explanation somehow goes in my mind with the ideas I felt when leaving “professional day” at my MFA program. While the idea of helping students survive outside of grad. school is commendable, it felt like I was trapped in a room with a bunch of people (from my MFA program, and from other MFA programs) that all wanted something so badly, that they couldn’t help but strive and bite and scratch and act in such a manner collectively as a desperate pack of dogs trying to claw their way to success and fame. I was maybe one of these strivers when I first entered the program, and maybe now that’s why I have such an aversion to it. I’ve also been disgusted with the way that a few mutual classmates have treated a dear friend of mine, who has suffered a stroke. It seemed thoughtless and cruel, some of the things people have told her, and they seemed to be coming from a place of envy. What kind of people, don’t respect when somebody has suffered an physical ailment so huge?
When my dad was in the hospital for cancer my first year in the program, I felt a similar lack of empathy from those around me. When my insurance dropped me, when I totalled my car the first year, when my mom was in the hospital, when I had my own cancer scare, when I was staying up all night taking care of my grandmother when she was having night terrors, etc, when I was working, doing an internship and taking three classes a semester, I felt similarly alone the first year. I felt like instead of asking me what was wrong, people assumed I had cooties or something.
I wonder, is it the drive to perform that pushes everyone to be so passive-aggressive? Is it the idea that we all want, beyond anything else in this world, to publish our writing and to be read by others? Is it the fear that there may not be enough slots for all of us to succeed? How many of us want to be writers because we want fame? Because we are chasing after an illusion that doesn’t really exist? Because we want people to validate us?
I don’t know the answer. But all I know is that every time I step foot onto campus, I leave and I’m fine for a while, but then I collapse in the mid-afternoon into my bed, or onto the couch and take a nap. It really exhausts me.
In fact, at the professional survival day, the only real true conversation I had time to have, was with two people. The first one: my friend who had the stroke. The second was with a writer I had thought snubbed me because he didn’t see my email. He said something really human to me. He asked me how my writing was going and I started to tell him, but then I realized that I really didn’t know what to say. I told him, well, I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing, but I think I’m doing this. He looked at me and said in a kind of confiding way, “Guppie Girl, that’s the secret. Nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing.” I found this to be incredibly kind, especially since here I was admiring him for all of his writing awards and accolades and he was able to be human. I found this to be refreshing.
Then, on Monday afternoon, as I crossed the rail-road tracks, under the freeway, I saw this woman. She was rail-thin, of an indeterminate age, a white lady with a thin brown, pony tail who looked like either a speed or heroin addict begging for money on the center devider. I had a dollar in my cupholder, and I was at a stop light, so I told my friend, the dancer to hold on a minute. I put the phone down, rolled down my window and handed her the dollar. She took it and gasped, a silent ‘Thank you’. I looked at her, with such compassion, but with no pity. I just looked her. I looked at her as if she were a person who I’d known my entire life. She looked at me, and she said the usual thing that homeless people tell me, if I give them change, “God bless you.”
Ok…nothing abnormal, there. But something felt very different about this interaction.
Then, the lady burst into tears. They were real tears. And I thought that maybe, she wasn’t sad, but was in a way, happy. That they were the gift of tears, a kind of spiritual joy that she was having. A release of some kind. I don’t know what it was exactly. But I felt such compassion for her, as a sister. I couldn’t explain it in the moment, and I didn’t do it justice. I sat and then I told her, I wish I had another dollar or something else to give you right now. She shook her head and breathed, no it’s not that. She continued to cry.
It was as if, as I watched her, as if her soul was naked, and who she was was layed bare. It was as if for the first time, she was making some kind of change. I felt that in my heart she had begged for the money to get drugs, but that she was aware that she had hit bottom, and maybe was vowing to make a change and get help. I don’t know.
The Greeks call this metanoia, a kind of “fundamental transformation of the mind and heart that takes the form of profound repentance. The beginning of the process, and a necessary stage, of the soul’s reunification with God.” (again this is from Makrides’ book). I have to say, that I felt love for this woman in this moment. And then the moment passed, I realized the light had turned green, and some jerk honked at me, so I said goodbye to her and went on my way.
I left the experience with goosebumps on my arm. I tried explaining what happened to my friend, the dancer who was still on the other end of the phone which I had momentarily forgotten was on the passenger seat waiting for me. But I don’t feel like I can really, truly put this experience into words.
It just taught me the incredible power of compassion. It can move people to tears. It can change horrible situations. It can console the unconsolable, it can give hope to the hopeless. That day I trafficked in compassion, trading thoughtful stares for tears at the center devider near the railroad tracks, stealing a brief moment of humanity. Me — a tiny ant– before the awesome face of kindness, the fleeting ephemeral nature of life.
