#25 This is the practice

On Saturday I took myself on a date to go see Tom Cruise cling to his youth in Top Gun: Maverick. I didn’t want to see it, but it was playing at the closest theater in the only acceptable time slot, so I did. I enjoyed it despite my curmudgeonly inclination to hate the things most people love (like pop music, Squid Games, and the season Fall).

Afterwards, I went shopping in a department store for the first time since 2019. It was weird, clothes seemed more expensive and the racks seemed less full and I think fashion might be really, really terrible right now. I grabbed some sensible items but also a daisy-print baby doll dress, and right as I tried that dress on a Very Young Sales Associate knocked on my dressing room door to ask me if I needed help. I swung open the door and said “Is this good or is this a mistake?” holding the hem of the dress out like I was ten and asking my mom, and she—with her plump cheeks, unlined face and platform flip flops!—said matter of factly: “It’s aging you.” I didn’t know what the fuck that even meant so I said “Thank you!!” like she’d saved me and she said “You’re welcome!!!” like she’d saved me and then I shut the door so I could die a little inside but privately. I looked in the mirror and wondered if I was one of those forty-something-ish women who doesn’t realize how ridiculous they look wearing a teenagers’s fashion. I wondered if I was someone I would have made fun of when I was that sales girl’s age. Also: remember the first part of this story when I told you about my resistance to watch Tom Cruise clinging to his youth. 

I didn’t buy the dress and while for a second I wished I was twenty, I stopped when I remembered how fucked up twenty was. Maybe I crossed some invisible threshold and I’m on the side where you can’t wear daisy-printed baby doll dresses with combat boots anymore (I mean I probably will though if we’re being honest). Maybe I look my age, maybe I look older than my age, maybe the last few years did things to me that can’t be undone.

I felt a lot of “oh fuck” walking to my car but by the third telling of that story to my closest people—who are all also likely to wear things that “age them” (whatever the fuck that means)—I couldn’t help but feel good about it. What felt at first like an admonishment from a person younger than my oldest credit card turned out to be a validation point: Here I am, I like here.

[Transition.]

As I mentioned in last week’s Ten Things Right Now, I recently finished a book called What is Zen: Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind by Norman Fischer. I’m not really well versed in the Zen tradition other than having read a lot of Alan Watts, so forgive me if you are and I mess this up, but what I so clearly got from Fischer’s book was how much Zen seems to be about the banality of life as the meat of practice. Fischer, a Zen priest with over forty years practice, mentions somewhere in the book that Zen is the “chop wood carry water” tradition—that you’re more likely to find God or enlightenment in what you’re doing the most than you are in the minutes you might spend on your meditation cushion.

This isn’t new information; just like you I’ve read the Power of Now. I understand the concepts of mindfulness, presence, and paying attention. I know what the present moment is and once or twice I’ve even put my finger through the middle of it and touched eternity. But sometimes Now and Now and Now is just another way to fail, or a concept so big you miss it entirely. I know Right Now is all I have, but often I’m busy Right Now thinking about all the ways I’m failing at enjoying the present moment, which I’ll get to after I purify myself on the meditation cushion I still struggle to get myself on.

But for some reason, reading Fischer’s book and the lesson that this (and even THIS) is the practice penetrated, and that’s what I wrote on my bathroom mirror. This is the practice.

Yesterday I had a meltdown out about the book I’m working on, mostly because I feel like I haven’t even started it even though I have. It’s a fucking disaster of notes and barely coherent sentences, and each time I sit down to work on it I think of Melissa Febos or Joan Didion or Roxane Gay or Courtney Maum and imagine they never had meltdowns or a mess of notes and impossibility, they only ever had fully formed books that poured from their dainty fingers to the page. I called my friend, another writer who just finished her second book, for help. She said “even when you’re doing it you’re not going to feel like you’re doing it.” I think that’s what I’m trying to say here. This, right here, right now, is the doing of it. This is the practice.

Love you.

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Ten Things Right Now

Watching Bears All Day, being v. v. pretentious about fake wine, the best novel I’ve read all year, the best song I heard all week, the Summer of Self-Medication.

1. “Looking old is not a health issue. Dreading looking old, on the other hand, very much is.” 

2. This live bear cam (7am-6pm PT) is joy

   

3. This Tara Brach podcast on forgetting who we are

4. This song

5. Enter: the summer of self-medication

6. I stopped using Instagram (consistently, hungrily, in the way I had for years) over a year ago, in April 2021, and while I said it was because I needed to go be lost, it was mostly because it’s hard for a fucked up person to make bite-sized aspirational content. I got back on the ‘gram sometime late last year and made a dozen or so posts, but my heart wasn’t in it and I found it took up too much space. I realized I could try really hard to be good at Instagram again, or I could try really hard to be a good writer, but I could not do both. I’m sure I’ll be back in my old form at some point (because books don’t sell themselves! and because (the adorable, lovely) Colleen Hoover has ruined every writer’s arguments about social media), but for now it is unthinkable. All this to say, I read a lot about the use of social media because I’m trying to figure out my relationship to it, and this piece by Haley Nahman on the topic of Make Instagram Great Again was one of the best and more normalizing things I’ve read on the subject in a while.

7. In related news, Jonah Hill releases film on mental health, refuses to do press tour to preserve mental health.

8. Books books books: Finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (incredible, hard recommend); The Hidden Messages in Water by Masuro Emoto (recommend).

9. Drugs drugs drugs: Japan wants its youth to drink more; the USofA wants to outlaw Juul and slash nicotine levels in cigarettes as (cigarettes make their comeback!); is it nutrition or is it disordered eating? is marijuana addictive? Governor Newsom rejects supervised injection sites to protect political aspirations, and half of all US teens use the internet almost constantly.

   

10. “Mom, what did you do as the country was drifting toward authoritarianism?” “Ah! I wrote columns about how the people fighting authoritarianism were annoying to me, personally.” 

11. Can someone please make this hotline but for booze

12. This article on what people in prisons make and spend; especially the story of Fugee who, for 20 cents an hour, inputs license plates captured via camera to generate pay-later toll bills. Having just received one of those bills, and thinking through the whole inhumane process that might have got it to me, is something worse than heartbreak. I don’t think there’s even a word for what it is. I think it’s worth noting: I do believe that each time a human looks at their own addictive patterns, this same system weakens.

13. “Radical truth-telling in a time where we are allergic to nuance holds great risks.” (Amen.)

14. “We are a nation that, a quarter-century into the worst addiction crisis in U.S. history, still makes death, incarceration and buying dope far easier to achieve than evidence-based treatment.” An excerpt of Beth Macy’s new book, Raising Lazarus, in the New York Times (which had an ad for wine in it on my phone).

15. This real, actual paragraph about a mocktail: I could drink this all day. It’s Casamara Club Como, a stunning combination of sparkling water infused with orange, chamomile, peppermint, licorice root, grapefruit, juniper, clove and cardamom with a touch of orange blossom honey and sea salt. It is thrillingly and subtly bitter, more spritz than spritz, and very grown-up. I return home, not at all drunk, and promptly order 24 cans for immediate delivery.

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