Alana's Dharma Blog

Counting down days to an upcoming vacation to Seattle and Napa, and suddenly I start wondering to myself,  “what the hell am I going to wear on this trip?”  I would rather wear pants than skirts, in case we are hiking a lot, but then I feel like I don’t have a jacket to match most of my pants. Plus, what if we want to go to a fancy meal –I will probably need at least one skirt.  Should I bring my favorite jacket…I want to pack light, maybe it is too heavy? If I bring a mix of pants and skirts can I get by with just one hat, or will it look too fancy with the pants and too casual with the skirts? Suddenly, what should be a relaxing vacation has me all stressed out, and I haven’t even left home yet.

Fretting I just don’t have the right stuff, I start trolling the web, looking for new travel clothes. Frankly, I feel bullied: Bullied by my body demanding that I accessorize and beautify it, that I hide the ugly parts. Bullied by the clothes I already have, demanding that I find things to match them.  Bullied by the future clothes that will force me to find storage for them in my already over-stuffed closet, that will need care and cleaning and folding. Bullied by outfits that will rip and stain and tear and make me sad to loose them, or that I will  grow out of and it will sit in my closet mocking me, reminding  me that I have gotten too fat or old to wear it.  My fingers clack at the keyboard extra hard –with the force of frustration and stress — still down, down, down, I scroll through Ebay’s fashion pages. If I am being honest, being bullied, “forced” to search onward by nothing other than myself.

Why do all this if it makes me feel so terrible? Because I need to be prepared of course! I need the right outfit to look chic on every occasion, the right jacket to keep me warm, the right clothes to convey professional but playful and elegant all at once, to announce my status and wealth, to augment my beauty and cover my flaws, to make friends and influence people and to be sure I fit-in. My wardrobe is just a tool box, filled with tools, to make me the on-top-in-control-buttoned-up-bad-ass-chick I know I am.

The problem: Can I possibly own everything I need to look chic on all occasions? To be warm/cool on every occasion? To fit-in and project the image I want to project on every occasion?  Wouldn’t I need an infinite amount of stuff? Can clothes really prepare me, can anything prepare me? Can an impermanent object, existing in an impermanent world, really be a fit-all-tool? I am literally chasing an impossibility.

“Fine” ignorant Alana concedes to wisdom Alana, before sneaking in a but, “but at least I can have what I need to be chic on these 2 occasions– a trip to Seattle and Napa.” Again though, can I really know for sure what the future of these places, in the limited window I am there, will be like? For all of my travels, how often have I brought too much stuff? How often was I missing just the thing I wanted? With countless past failures, why do I think I can be perfectly prepared this time? And is the right hat or jacket really going to be what guarantees my perfect preparation, even if  such a thing existed?

At the end of my frantic fashion scrolling I decided I couldn’t quite find the right stuff to buy. I figured I would just make due with what I already have in my overflowing wardrobe. But as I closed-up my laptop, frustrated both by not finding the “right thing”, and the mad-rush quest to find it in the first place, I couldn’t help but think about how painful it is to be lead around by my wrong view of what clothes are: By my delusion that they reify me, define and protect me, control how others see me.

The truth is, bad shit can befall me no matter what I wear; in fact, I have a high-heel induced toe injury that proves bad shit can happen because of what I wear. People can like or hate me no matter what I wear; in fact, jumping on the Z. Cavaricci  fashion trend to try and be cool in elementary school caused me to be bullied even worse than before I wore those horrid pants. Wearing white won’t make me saint like or enlightened, and keeping around a black jacket won’t make me emotionally ready to handle Eric’s funeral. All said, I can’t even remember a trip where what I wore was some huge issue, or where it made me happy, or satisfied or guaranteed either a good, or bad, time.

Lately I have been contemplating on beauty. It is a quality so dear to me, I dedicate so much of my time, my energy, my possessions in service of it. When I think of a moment I consider to be one of my ‘peak beauty moments’ — standing in front of the full length mirror, modeling my bright red wedding dress, my super-fit 20 something bod and flawless dewy skin — it seems all rainbows and candy canes, the joy and pride and elation of seeing beauty, ‘having’ beauty, being beautiful. Of course I celebrate it, cultivate it, desire it desperately. Why wouldn’t I?

But beauty’s shadow self is already upon me — I literally see it in my own reflection — it is the fact that beauty fades. My own beauty fades, and that loss stabs me in the heart each time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. 

I was looking through a photo album the other day, I found a picture of my Mom back when Seth and I were kids,  she was so young and so pretty. Now, in a more recent picture she looks so old, wrinkled and saggy. It happened to her, and it is happening to me, RIGHT NOW. My skin around my eyes starting to get crepey, my boobs sagging, my cheeks looking sunken.

Even when I can manage a beauty moment, there is always backsliding. Even as I stood there, 30-something-fitter-than-most-20-somethings, dressed for Halloween as a perfect Wonder Woman, I was eyeing the pizza restaurant wondering when starvation would win over my willpower to be thin.  I just had fillers and I am already thinking of the next treatment, worried about the second to worst cosmetic problem, now that the first worst is ‘solved’. I diet, and am thin for a second, before I backtrack, never really going back to as thin as I was in my peak days. Always, there is someone more beautiful. In my peak days, there were my drop-dead gorgeous friends Erica and Jessica that could turn every eye in a room away from me. Now, in my 40s, there is almost everyone younger.

In my own, rather short lived beauty, there have been countless physically painful moments; literal poking, prodding, fillers and botox, laser treatments and hours at the gym, seeking to maintain or return beauty lost. There are all the emotional pains too; the horror of  finding my fist gray hair, looking in the mirror as I get a hair cut and trying to bear the sight of my sagging jowls, humiliation when I have a pimple or a cold sore at a big event. The planning for procedures, the fear I might get found out, or permanently scarred. How do I regularly ignore these pains? How do I ignore a lifetime of hurt to achieve something so so fleeting?

Pain/pleasure, censure/praise,  gain loss, fame/insignificance, as I was considering the polarity of the worldly conditions, it dawned on me that their pairings are inevitable; they will always come together, unbreakably linked for all time. The reason is simple — whatever has the ability to move in one direction has the ability to move in the other: If something can accumulate it can dissipate, if it can grow it can whither, the quality that allows for gain is the same quality that allows for loss. Everything is this way, it is baked into the fabric of this world.

I was looking at my favorite yellow purse, starting to fray a bit at the seams, and I realized I could consider the physical world in terms of pairings as well, in terms of coming together and moving apart. My purse is an aggregation of parts, a zipper, leather, strings, nylon, bottlecaps, by definition the fact that it had the ability to come together means it has the ability to come apart. That is the nature of all 4e objects. My body is the same way, a compilation of skin and sinew and organs and cells, they come together in a certain form, for a time, and then the parts disaggregate. Through this body I experience both pleasure and pain; the same mechanisms — the same neuropathways and brain functions, the ability of all those little neurons and signals to aggregate and disaggregate in particular ways — that allow for pleasure under one circumstance are the very mechanisms that facilitate pain in another.

My problem is that I want pleasure and not pain. I want a purse that is together not falling apart, I want a body whose aggregation is young and fit and healthy. I want beautiful not ugly.  But opposites are built into the nature of each up/down. States that I find preferable all depend on circumstances, and we live in a world where circumstances continuously change, so how could states not follow suite?

In one circumstance a purse or an Alana body are whole and in another they start coming apart.  That is normal.  Which makes me start wondering… maybe what is abnormal is me. More specifically, my expectation that stuff (both material and immaterial) that is part of an eternally bound pair, would only ever show the side of the pair that I prefer. Maybe my suffering isn’t really normal either: There is no particular value built into either side of a pair –heads or tails, a quarter is just a quarter — I only suffer if I am rooting for heads and tails come-up. In other words, I am the cause of my own suffering, I have normalized it, taken for granted that it is just a part of my life, but it doesn’t really have to be; if I can just abandon my preferences/desires that cause the suffering in the first place…man the Buddha was really on to something…