Sitting with Joyful Disappointment, by guest writer Jim Infantino

Recently, one of the bigger mysteries of my life was solved. Not only solved, but tied up neatly, with a big fat happy ending. All of my fears about that situation were, though far from baseless, ultimately not realized. I should be overjoyed, and I am. However, it is also true that part of me feels let down, and I find that fascinating.

The story goes like this: In my teenage years, I had a friend, who was a girl - not really a girlfriend, but someone that I spent tons of time talking to. She seemed to really get me, and I felt like I really got her, and we drank copious quantities of coffee in diners and cafes between classes, and after school all over lower Manhattan. She was a dancer, and very pretty and had a sharp perception that cut through all my bullshit. I was enthralled. Gradually, I began to notice that her life had taken a darker turn. She had quit dancing, started smoking more, stopped eating. She came to school less and less, she cut her hair short, died it black, spent nights out with her older aunt in punk clubs, all the time getting thinner and thinner. I was scared for her. I tried to talk to her, tried to help in some way, but the forces in her life moving her in this direction were beyond me. Our talks became more and more rare, her depression seemed to deepen daily. Then she stopped coming to school at all. Her phone number was disconnected. I asked around about her, but no one knew anything. I stopped by her house, walked around her neighborhood repeatedly, but there was just no sign of my friend anywhere.

Months went by. As I began to accept that my friend was gone, and since I had no further information, I began to make up stories about why she was gone. Some involved addiction, some crime or violence, some involved a move somewhere exotic with her dad or aunt, or maybe she just went to another school, or dropped out and was living as an artist in the lower east side, perhaps she was just around the next corner. This continued for years. Something about the disappearance of this friend irked me in a way that nothing else in my life had before. I alternately kept expecting to run into her on the subway, as I grieved the possibility that she had died somehow.

Years went by. I moved away from New York for college, then up to Boston, made new friends and lost some of them as well, but this core story of the loss of my high school friend never really left me. I would remember our cafe conversations, and these scenes took on more and more of the sepia-tinted quality of a movie or novel. She was the essence of a tragic genius, undone by some unseen dark power, and I was the compassionate hero, unable to stop the encroaching darkness. We drank champagne as the tanks rolled in. The last train was leaving Paris. She never met me at the station. I was left, standing in the rain, the note falling from my hand as the music swelled around me, and the conductor yelled “all aboard!” You know the film.

What I didn’t notice so much at the time, was how the stories I made up about her, had become an essential part of who I was. In a strange way, my mind had leapt at the opportunity to fabricate a melodramatic plot around what was essentially a non-event. I felt hurt, and insecure because of her disappearance, but I was far from abandoned. Her life had changed in some way I was just not privy to. But it was that gap in my understanding of what had really happened that I latched onto. My mind could not help but to pour bottles of self-centered drama like honey or ketchup all over my story-line. I was secretly savoring and perpetuating the flavor of this fading sadness like it was something delicious.

30 years later, something happened that is so mundane, that I have trouble writing it down. I found her on Facebook. She is fine. Turns out she went through a rough patch back then, but never succumbed to the many traps that lay like huge spike bottomed pits around the city of our childhood. She is still the same, brilliant person, but not so sad any more. She is creating art, happily married, raising 2 beautiful kids. We recently had tea - I introduced my wife, got to meet her husband, we all got along great. Good news, right?

I think you see the problem. What do I do with all that fantastic footage I had going in my head? I can feel it tumble like strands of hair on the projector room floor. Along with it, I go too. I can no longer be the person I created without this tragic story I carried around for so long. The drama is undone and I feel a bit less interesting for it’s absence.

Lately, this is my strongest reminder to sit.

Sitting practice does not come easy to me. Once I start, I mostly find I can sit for as long as is needed, but getting started is always the problem. I have downloaded cute little timers to my phone and computer, to remind me and time me, left notes around my house, scheduled sitting into my morning ritual, guilted myself for not doing it, set resolution after resolution, and none of it has “solidified” my daily practice. To sit with regularity, each day needs it’s own unique effort. My mind comes up with endless schemes to keep me from putting my ass on that cushion.

However, I am gradually getting better at paying less attention to those schemes. I sit and notice the torrent of thought. Some days there is just a trickle, occasionally, I have a blissfully quiet sit. I feel a lack of something there on the cushion, a sadness for a loss that has no real words. It is the same sadness I feel for the demise of the story about my friend’s demise. Describing it further is pointless, language does not go there.

Thankfully, what happens on the cushion does not stay on the cushion. The flood of thoughts that I notice and label “thinking” I also notice when I walk down the street for coffee, or stare out the window during the day. I cannot catch myself up in my own melodrama of plans, replays of conversations, worries about the future, desires for the latest gizmos, schemes for work, ad-infinitum, the same way I used to.

My inner author is constantly composing, constantly tweaking this, improving that. That author is also a director - adjusting the light on my projections, making them sexier, more exciting. He is also a composer, bringing in the violins, drums, horns to accentuate the right memory, fear, desire. The more I notice him, the more it all seems like a load of crap. Every instant that I spend lost in that halcyon fantasy, is an instant I lose from my life in this world.

So I sit a little bit every day. I make plans for longer retreats of sitting, not because I think it will be an exciting breakthrough of enlightened consciousness, but because I am both weary and suspicious of my own narrative, and sitting affords me a tiny break during which I can more clearly see the brighter, sharper world beyond my own tragic-comedy.

Tags: meditation

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Community Articles, Northeastern States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a comment.