All I can tell you is we’re back in it, officially and for real. Lemme explain: A year ago was The Age of Cancer and blah blah. You can read all about it. So then: cancer, treatment, the arrival of our first child, parental leave, and for the last few months this extended quasi limbo where the glow of being a new parent and the relief of having Beat Cancer (twice now), plus a large degree of flexibility job-wise… it’s felt like a kind of liminal state, neither here nor there. Except now, the limbo is over: work stress, kid stress, life stress. We are definitely not there. We are here. And here kinda sucks. (Although, hint: It doesn’t have to; more on this in a second.)
Do you know the movie Phantom Thread? It’s part of P.T. Anderson’s meandering navel-gazey phase that begins with Inherent Vice and is still going (what the hell was Licorice Pizza anyway?). But so it’s about this fashion designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s obsessive about his work, just this ball of stress at all times, and the only way to even get him to turn this machine off is for his beloved to intentionally poison him. It’s only when he’s immobilized from puking that he can truly experience the life he’s so ostensibly enthralled by.
And I think about this a lot lately. Because as I said we’re back in it—the day to day, the hustle and bustle. Lately we’ve been trying to sleep-train the baby, are following this 14-day program that’s a variation of cry-it-out (no hate mail, please), and so lately there have been a lot of long stretches of high-decibel screeching from the other room while we just lay there and watch the clock and wait for the baby to self-sooth. And we’re nearing the end and there’s been substantial improvement but there have also been several “extinction bursts,” which is when the baby reverts back to full-bore screeching, which is stressful and makes you question the whole endeavor/life itself (which I guess is parenting in a nutshell: constantly questioning, constantly second-guessing). But it’s fine, it’s fine—this is parenting, this is what we signed up for.
But then there was also a major professional setback last week. I won’t go into it (why would I go into it?), but it’s one of those setbacks—like a bad break up, or losing in the playoffs—that triggers this ruminative merry-go-round, where you agonize over which of any number of decisions might have led to a better outcome, and you keep replaying various conversations, various situations, trying to reverse-chaos-theory the whole thing. If the butterfly had flapped its wings slightly differently during this one phone call a year ago, could this massive, course-altering setback have been avoided?
The point I’m trying to make is that there are times when I find myself pining for the clarity of purpose that presided over my days when I was sick. There was no second-guessing, no white-knuckle stress sessions, no boring-ass career ruminations. I didn’t wake up and wonder if I was making good business decisions, or sound parenting choices. The universe had fed me poison mushrooms, and it erased the whole slate.
But let’s not romanticize the past. Let’s focus on what we can do now, right now, during those moments when the world seems to be squeezing us in all directions, because oh the squeezing never stops these days, does it? Because multiply all of the above by our various political and existential crises… So let’s talk, for a minute, about tigers.
There’s a Buddhist parable that goes like this: A woman is traipsing through the jungle, as one does, when she comes upon some hungry-looking tigers. She flees, and the tigers give chase. She arrives at a cliff overlooking a shallow ravine, with vines hanging over it, and with some relief begins to lower herself. As she’s halfway to the jungle floor, she looks down only to see there are more tigers waiting for her there, and they look hungry, too. Then she sees some mice gnawing on the vine she’s clinging to. Damnit. At that exact moment, she notices a strawberry bush growing out of the cliffside. She picks a berry and eats it and it’s delicious.
Pema Chödrön introduced me to this parable, and she summarizes the moral like this: “Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and our death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry we ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”
Tigers above, tigers below. But guess what: It’s strawberry season. I wish you good picking.
This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, why not share it with a friend, or better yet buy them a gift subscription.
Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
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For those who haven’t noticed, we’ve started publishing these rad Q&As on Sundays now. Check out this week’s with this newsletter’s very own writer/editor/communist Tommy Craggs:
I love how you can talk about what feels like a cliched topic now - being present - without being cliched in the least. You made it interesting and meaningful and funny. Thanks Garrett!