equanimity

composure. sangfroid. even-headedness. i am filled with it this morning, and i am not at all impressed.

equanimity is the goal of the buddhist practice. it strikes me as the thing that john the baptist must have cultivated in himself while awaiting his death, what the apostle paul must have settled into while languishing in prison after prison, what mandela must have required to endure and then to forgive. it is what i see in the dalai lama every time he is interviewed, and i have always desired to be in that state.

acceptance. resignation without giving up. a decided lack of passion about one's own circumstance. i don't mean to imply that i am stuck in any sort of prison or anything of the sort. if anything, quite the opposite today. in yesterday morning, upon waking, i found myself making a connection to the world i have not felt in quite some time, if ever. it was not that i looked around and felt that all was love, that i clicked into place and everything around me suddenly made sense, or that every choice i have ever made came rushing back to me in a pregnant moment and i gained great clarity as to how i came to be where i am. nothing so grandiose, i'm afraid, but i did wake on sunday morning with a feeling that i was part of the picture, the really big one.

for a long, long time now i have felt outside of it all, like i had somehow been lifted out of the stream of consciousness the rest of the world swims in and had been left to sit on the shore and watch the fun with muddy feet. it was a feeling of separateness, of aloneness almost - a feeling that i wasn't quite fitting the way i am supposed to, like a puzzle piece that someone has jammed into the wrong space, bent tabs squeezed into a place in which they don't belong, kinked up and image flaking off. it had become not so serious as that perhaps, but rather than feeling jammed in it had come to the point where i had pulled myself out of the space altogether and rested on the picture wondering where my place even was. i don't know that i have truly wedged myself back in yet, but i at least recognized yesterday that i have tabs and divots, that there is indeed a spot for me to fit in this grand design. i felt like i did have someplace i belonged and was part of the picture. i felt other people like they were peers, not threats.

i ran yesterday, too, for the first time in 2 months or so. i had taken a trot last weekend - just a lazy something to test the legs and see how the felt - but yesterday i ran for real. just a quick 5k, but that was just the thing: it was reasonably quick, under 25 minutes. not bad, and the legs feel pretty good this morning. but i ran. got back to being me for a bit. nice.

and this has all left me with a feeling of equanimity. i have peace, i have some small sense of contentment. i am neither overjoyed nor irritated this morning. i find myself of simple and sound mind with neither thrill nor venom. i just am. i have achieved, to some degree, what i have sought. and it is uncomfortable.

i am not calm. i am not smooth. i have always been in turmoil. i have, for as long as i can remember, been a busy sea, and to have my waves suddenly gone is leaving me a little confused, i think. i am passionate, enthralled, annoyed, roiling and boiling and bubbling and tossed about, rain-spattered and water over the gunwales or racing swiftly under blue skies and over sun-baked simple waves, with the light hot on my back and my attention on the sea in front, waiting for the wave that would bounce me from my joys and thrash me back into stormy waters. to sit still in the doldrums, waves gone and sea of glass beneath me, breezes cool and temperate and soft enough not to disturb my lack of motion, is unfamiliar and not a little disconcerting.

i have come to where i want to be, or at least have found my way into the same country, sharing surroundings with it, and i am finding that this country is so new and so different that it is hard to decide that it is a nice place to stay. i know that i must remain here in the glass-smooth seas of this country, if only to survive the journey, for i know to have lived as long as i have in the surging waters of my own oceans has been sheer luck. my outlook has been severe, my waves sharp and dangerous, and to have made it through them has been as astounding a bit of fortune as this world has seen. and so it is not without great introspection that i say that i feel like a foreigner here in this smooth water. for all of the connection i felt yesterday, for all the part-of-it-allness, the very feeling of composure it begat has created a dis-ease within me through my lack of familiarity with it.

sad, i suppose, that i should get to the point that so many wish to achieve - the connection and acceptance rolled together into a balance that gives peace and calm outlook that can take so long to cultivate - only to be confused that it has stolen my passion. i feel things in great, wide swings, depths and peaks of equal height and depth if not frequency, and this spot in between which we all seek has me wondering what the big deal is. i am fighting for acceptance of my own acceptance, equanimity in the face of my own equanimity. with my passions quelled, this middle ground feels to me to be middling. this could take more work than i thought.