How to inhabit your life: being alive now, it’s all we’ve got

The below is an email I got from a good friend. It’s content is rather a universal message so I asked to share the whole email and I was granted permission. I’ve got great friends who inadvertently write my posts with some frequency!! Her email especially spoke to me now as I’ve completed a first draft for my one year anniversary of the withdrawal completion and the theme is learning to live well while being sick. This is my life and I intend to make the best of it. This piece is about much the same thing. We all must make the best of wherever we are in life.

Hey…I wanted to share something with you that I found really inspiring from Geneen Roth’s book “Women, Food and God”…it’s focused on women with issues surrounding food, but you can apply this stuff to any situation, because she’s basically applying a Buddhist perspective to the eating thing. I think it applies well to almost any problem where you find you’re not open to being present because you’re focused on the end goal (including an issue like drug withdrawal or being completely well after drug withdrawal).

Anyway she spoke to an issue I have in a better way than I’ve ever found–my particular issue of feeling like I’m a “nobody” and I want to “Be someone”…doing something “Big”, “Going Places”. This is a letter she wrote in response to a woman who was having trouble with binging because she was in a job she considered beneath her…she just got her law degree and had to kind of be in the trenches for awhile doing grunt work before she could do the bigger sort of law work she dreamed of…she felt empty, and she turned to food. Here’s what Roth wrote to her:

“It seems as if you chose this career and therefore this career arc, etc. Can you accept that? Not as resignation which is how people define acceptance. Not as victimhood: “Poor me, I can’t do anything but accept the situation”. But as the willingness to stop defining your tasks as a means to an end and instead inhabit what you yourself have chosen. What if this is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing because it _is_ what you are doing? What if each nitty gritty task is perfection itself and you keep missing it because you’re looking for something else?

It’s like washing the dishes. If you focus on getting the dishes done so that your kitchen will be clean, you miss everything that happens between dirty and clean. The warmth of the water, the pop of the bubbles, the movements of your hand. You miss the life that happens in the middle zone–between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you’d rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

Even when you become Something, because they were right, you really were Going Places–even when you arrive at being Someone because you are where you were going–your life might not be any better if you haven’t learned to be awake, alive, now. So take this moment for what it is. It’s just as easy to be miserable when you are Someone Special as when you are No one in Particular. Because even Someone Special comes home at night and does what the Nobodies do: falls asleep alone. You might as well learn how to pay attention now. How to inhabit the life you’ve chosen. How to take up every inch of your skin. Occupy the space in this body you were given. It’s your place. Only yours.

The writer Annie Dillard says, “How you spend your days is how you spend your life”. Be unwaveringly honest. Ask yourself how you want to spend your days. Since you’re going to be reviewing documents anyway, why not be aware of your breath and the ticking clock while you’re doing it?

Whatever it offers, the reality of your day-to-day life has to be better than the self-inflicted misery you are creating through the stories you are telling yourself. It has to be better than the nightly binges and throwing yourself into the cycle of self-loathing and promises to stop eating so much.

Come back. Break the trance. Pay attention to your breath. Your arms. Your legs. Listen to the sounds. The scrape of a chair. The whirr of the copy machine. Notice colors. The royal blue of a coworkers dress. The coffee stain on your bosses tie. Wake up to the riot of life all around you every second. The singer Pearl Bailey said, “People see God every day; they just don’t recognize Him.” What if every day was a chance to see a new version of God? What if what you needed was right in front of you and you were not recognizing it?

You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work, despite the corporate ladder you are climbing, is to do whatever it takes to realize that. And then it won’t matter if you’re Someone Special or No One in Particular because you’ll be fully alive in every moment–which is, I imagine, all you ever wanted from Going Places to Be Someone.”

–Geneen Roth, “Women, Food and God“