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Hi, friends. I’m in bed.
I’m fine. Or I will be fairly soon, anyway. The reason is, I went to my annual physical yesterday. Now that I’m over 50 they want to do all sorts of extra things, like squish and photograph my boobies, which I agreed to, and do a CT scan of my chest, which I didn’t. They also offered me a shingles vaccine. And when the lovely, redheaded nurse informed me that 1 in 6 people experience a marked reaction— aches and pains and tiredness— then asked, did I want to think about what I might have to do tomorrow (in case I ended up feeling maybe not like I got run over by a truck exactly but vaguely nudged by one)? I responded glibly, I’ll be fine.
Friends, I was not fine. I mean, I rode the bus to work this morning and got the most essential things done, but I also went to work when I was in the early hours of labor with my first child, so my capacity for gauging my own readiness is clearly questionable. By lunch, I had to admit that all I wanted to do was lie down, and by 1:30 I was walking home. I climbed into bed immediately and fell into a weird, thick, hazy sleep for a while, which seems to have helped some. The cats, I discovered upon waking, had come to sit vigil on this odd occurrence— me sleeping in the middle of the day. Even in the bone-breaking exhaustion of my children’s infancies I wasn’t a napper, but perhaps I’m mellowing as I age. Or just…aging.
When I awoke, this one, Pagan, was napping next to me in solidarity.
And this one, Mononoke, was spying on my butt.
Probably because I won’t let her get on top of me while I’m sleeping. As soon as I roused myself enough to sit up, she climbed on my lap. And, yes, I’m typing this with the keyboard practically in my throat because I don’t want to displace her.
Let me explain why I call this my treehouse, which it isn’t technically. But ever since my dad, along with my brother David, built us the most magical treehouse when I was about six years old— with a shingled roof and real glass windows that opened and closed and a spiral staircase up around the trunk of the tree— I’ve wanted to live in a treehouse. When I moved into my current house and discovered the back upstairs bedroom had skylights
a deep porch,
and little windows at floor level that looked out on the street,
I dubbed it my treehouse. I feel tucked away up here. In the world, but not of it. It’s a delicious feeling, especially when I’m sick.
Welcome to my treehouse.
Despite feeling poorly, I’m writing from bed in my treehouse because I wanted to share a few things with you. And, no, not just pictures of my cats.
Both are newsletters, and both, I hope, you’ll subscribe to because they are delightful and useful spurs for introspection. Introspection, of course, is a necessary aspect of discernment, which is an essential aspect of practicing integrity.
The first is a newsletter by the poet Maggie Smith, called For Dear Life. Some of you may be familiar with Maggie from her well-known poem, Good Bones.
In her newsletter, Maggie offers personal essays, answers questions about writing, and takes her readers through the evolution of some of her poems. I’m not a poet, but I find following along as she takes us through her process often unexpectedly moving. In a recent edition, walking through various drafts of her poem, During Lockdown, I Let The Dog Sleep In My Bed Again, she wrote something that really struck me:
We might find that we need to return to drafts 1, 2, and 3 to bring back some of the wildness and weirdness we scrubbed out of the poem along the way.
We don’t know what’s going to work, so we try something. And then we try something else. And again, and again, and again.
Here’s to the trying—
Replace “out of the poem” with “out of ourselves” and I think you’ve got a fairly accurate description of aging with some integrity. Do you agree?
I’ve pre-ordered Maggie’s new memoir as well, which I’m quite excited to read, and have been listening to interviews with her as I ride the bus to work. One of my favorites was on the podcast, Depresh Mode.
The other newsletter that I hope you’ll subscribe to is Oldster Magazine. Author Sari Botton hosts this vital, marvelous space where people of various ages reflect on what it’s like to age in a body. There are essays, including one I wrote for her a while back, and interviews. The Oldster Questionnaire is one of my favorite recurring features, and Thursday’s edition featured another author, Cheryl Strayed, that along with Sari is in the Let Your Life Speak orbit. Cheryl has a show based on her wildly successful book, Tiny, Beautiful Things, coming out on Hulu Friday, which I, for one, will be glued to all evening.
Cheryl’s one of us, y’all. Sari, too. Let’s support them.
In answer to the question, What has aging given you? Cheryl responded, “A greater sense of gentleness toward myself and others. I’m less likely to believe the assumptions I’ve made about others are true and more aware that I’ve made assumptions. I see more shades of gray, rather than black and white.”
Like while reading Maggie Smith’s reflections, I began thinking about myself at various ages, the different drafts of myself. I also find myself becoming gentler these days, which was not something I expected, or even welcomed, when I was starting out in the world. I responded:
That thing about the way life can gentle us... I think when I was young, wildly angry, grieving, and drunk on my own righteousness I would have resisted anyone who suggested that being gentled by life, becoming more aware and open to nuance and complexity, more willing to question my own assumptions, had something useful to offer me. I would have felt they were trying to take something essential away from me. Surely, they just resented my insight and wanted to silence me. It's taken me decades to tire of the sharp edges of myself and want to be able to embrace the world more tenderly in all of its mess and difficulty and poignant joy.
In some ways, for me anyway, it came from having children. All those years of their soft bodies constantly pressed up against me, the way they would relax into me in a moment, their breath steady and deep. What a thing, to be able to do that! I find myself yearning to be able to relax into the world like that. Holding it all at arm's length, to maintain some illusion of safety and control and critical analysis, increasingly just leaves me lonely. I find myself wanting to love the world more than "understand" it, but ironically I probably understand more now than I did before just by virtue, as Cheryl notes, of sticking with it for all of this time and letting the force of it erode my edges.
Since writing a piece recently about the origin of my obsession with integrity, I’ve been thinking about how my relationship with integrity has grown and evolved over time. I didn’t write this in that piece, but I must admit it’s true. For years, my fixation with integrity was largely a trauma response. I truly believed that if I could practice integrity perfectly it would give me the moral high ground to convince other people to practice integrity, too, and that would keep me safe. From harm and suffering. From confusion or error or anxiety.
You likely won’t be surprised to find out, it didn’t do that. Practicing integrity returned lost pieces of myself to me. It taught me to pay deep attention to myself and other people. It forced me to reckon with the inevitability of everyone’s imperfections, especially mine, and find some mercy for us all. But it didn’t protect me from the world or from being human. It simply helped me, continues to help me, be here without reservation in all the mess and sorrow and joy.
Thanks for being here with me, friends. You are the most excellent company.
XO, Asha
The shingles vaccine really does pack a wallop (although I've been told shingles is FAR WORSE) I hope you are turning the corner.
I recently became a paid subscriber to Maggie Smith's newsletter too and agree - by becoming privy to her revisions, my writing or at least approach to writing is all the better!
Thank you for sharing your cats and treehouse. I browsed my way here from your reply to Cheryl Strayed’s Oldster questionnaire, and I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on integrity. No better place to ride out side effects than in a treehouse!