Lean In

an amazing book!

There has been a small book on my bedside table for a couple months now. I opened it once, and after that I did not touch it.

The book actually doesn’t seem to sit or even lie on the table. It seems to hover— held aloft from the earth and all its possessions from the energy of its message.

Which, of course, I cannot speak of, because I have not yet really read it.

Tonight it fell open to the middle, to page 55, the last page of the chapter “We Have What We Need.”
Here’s what I read, without intention.

“Then the next time you lose your heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in…. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves.

“This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering — yours, mine, and that of all living beings.” –– Pema Chödrön

When I received this book, Colin looked at the cover and said: “How appropriate!” and smiled.

I had only just started taking swimming lessons, to overcome my fear of deep waters.

I bought goggles, then, so when I finally was willing to open my eyes, under water, I could see.

I could see, but my mind would leap and my breath disappear at the sight of the deep end’s floor sloping away from me.

Fear is a well-worn path– one we often know so well, we don’t realize we are careening down its rutted spine simply by feel– eyes screwed shut.

Fear is a tentacled nightmare and it grows bigger, wilder heads in the black pit of abandoned sleep.

The way legs move below the surface is beautiful and erratic. We forget our legs in a swimming pool, like we forget our weight. Like we forget our weighty attachments.