I need to learn my own lessons! In the past few weeks I’ve discovered things worth continually rediscovering, ideas so counterintuitive I might just have to learn them over and over. I wrote about the pleasures of being truly tired—but am I remembering the delights of full days and deep sleep, or am I slipping into weariness and irritability? I wrote about really practicing meditation for the first time—but am I still letting my tongue go loose, or have I gone back to my old habits of using logic to trick myself into thinking what I want to think?
Yesterday I found myself spinning all sorts of stories—beautiful, compelling lies. I was torturing myself with the old narratives, the ones I’d thought I’d unlearned. I was piling up everything I had to do into one monstrous insurmountable berg. You know this train of thinking! I’m too busy to see straight. I’m wasting my time. No one even appreciates everything I’m doing. Which morphs and contorts into Nobody cares about me. No one loves me. And then the pièce de résistance: I’m going to die alone in a ditch. Good times!
But I called my mom well before I was aware I was the one putting myself off course. Unbeknownst to the passengers, the train had left the tracks and was hurtling into the placid lake. (I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant novel Housekeeping right now and couldn’t avoid the train derailment metaphor! My engine had “nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it like a weasel sliding off a rock.”) My mom, of course, diagnosed a bad case of exhaustion-induced doom-cultivating. The call dropped at a crucial moment—she was just about to tell me how to solve all my problems! I was left feeling verklempt and alone. But now I had a pressing question I needed to answer for myself: How do I get the train back on the tracks?
I meditated. I went outside. I did some art. I ate. I read.
Remembering lessons you’ve already learned is harder than it seems. When learning a new language you need to hear, say, and write a new word forty times before you even begin to remember it. Forty times! So I’m not going to chastise myself for not immediately knowing how to solve my problems—I’m just going to relearn the same unobvious lessons again and again.