This has been, as far as I can remember, the most stressful year of my life. So much fell apart. The newspaper where I had a column for twenty years folded. With it about fifteen years of archives of my work.
I faced more professional rejection than I`ve ever had to face as a I tried to make the transition to long form journalism and sell a book proposal. In part to make ends meet, I took a deal to move out of my apartment at the end of my lease. But with no income coming in, I worried how I would find a landlord willing to rent to me.
With so much anxiety and stress blowing around in my mind, it was hard to meditate. I could feel my physical and mental health ebbing away as the stress proliferated.
But I made it through. A few days ago I got news that I'd received a grant. Enough money that I can spend the next year working on a book project. Enough money that for the next while, I can breathe.
During a period of deep crisis a few week back I reached out for consolation from my brother. A deeply sensitive person and a gifted actor, he has struggled all his life with low self esteem and obsessive compulsive disorder. It seemed to me in the last few months he's been able to pull himself out of a terrible rut and get his confidence back. I've always tried to be there for him, but this time I really needed his help. He turned me on to the work of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
I'm sure I'll be writing more about him in future blogs, but one of the he tells a story in the opening chapters of his book The Joy of Living about the anxiety and panic attacks he struggled with as a child. It must have been a stressful childhood, given that he's an incarnate, declared the reincarnation of a seventeenth century rinpoche. That's a lot of pressure for a kid. But towards the end of his teenage years, as he struggled with this chronic anxiety, he had a realization. This anxiety wasn't a deeply entrenched fact of his brain. It was more of a heightened awareness of the anxiety that most people live with. Many people have nervous breakdowns. As he worked through it, he began to think of it has his nervous breakthrough.
This has been a year of nervous breakthrough. I have questioned my path as a writer, over and over again. But I didn't fall apart. I kept writing. I kept standing even if I could stand it for more than twenty minutes. I know I watched too much television, but I made it through. And now I approach my fiftyeth year with more confidence and peace and money than I had last year at this time.
My one goal for next year is to write a book. To support that goal I plan to do a lot of standing, and do a lot of rebuilding of my sense of peace and equanimity.
Or let me tweak that. Do much rebuilding of my awareness of peace an tranquility. Because it has always been there for me. It is always there for me, and it will always be there for me.
