I’ve been sitting a lot lately with the amount of uncertainty in my life. Not necessarily trying to fix it, but just sitting with it, getting familiar with it.
There’s a lot of uncertainty.
I had a flare of Long Covid (LC) symptoms beginning a week ago that felt awful and has totally deflated me. My income has dropped much more sharply than I had anticipated, and some of the work I was planning to pick up has now gotten a lot more complicated to begin. My partner’s also having a rough time financially and is having car trouble. The state of Maine still hasn’t processed my LLC registration, 6+ weeks after I submitted it.
There’s a lot. :)
Parts of that have been wildly stressful, scattered, disorganized, out of control.
For some reason, today, I had a clear moment of recognition:
There are striking parallels between this feeling and how I felt in 2018 when I had just finished hiking the Appalachian Trail. My feet were destroyed; I was perilously skinny; I was mostly broke and sleeping on friends’ floors, couches, and guest beds; most of my worldly possessions were in a storage unit; and I had no idea what I wanted to do for work.
Everything in my life felt uncertain.
Yet the parallels stop there.
In 2018, I did not feel especially stressed about all the disorder and uncertainty. I remember it as a somewhat joyful time.
So I’ve been wondering: What’s the difference? Why is now so much harder?
For one thing, our shared collective reality is a lot less optimistic these days, between the pandemic, economic uncertainty, Ukraine, Gaza, the upcoming election, the weird housing market in the U.S.…pick a stressor, there are so many to choose from.
But there’s something more than that, something much deeper.
At a very fundamental level, I suspect the difference for me now is that I have a very different relationship with the concept of impermanence.
2018 Sassafras was 100% connected to the nature of impermanence in her life.
She’d spent 5.5 months hiking the Appalachian Trail, most of that with awful nerve pain or numbness in both feet. Her body, which had previously been a trusted beast machine, had demonstrated its fragility and tenuousness, yet it still persevered. She’d been living outside for that time, hiking roughly 12 hours a day, subject to the whims of the weather and the elements, aware constantly of how fleeting both good and bad things were. And very aware of how placing her attention on bad things could magnify and multiply their power.
She was incredibly present, and she had an annoying, effervescent belief in trail magic.
She was one of the best versions of me: an indomitable belief in the goodness of humanity and herself; an absolute certainty that her own strength of will was all-powerful, that she only needed to turn it to the next goal or challenge and begin work anew; and that even if it seemed beyond her body’s abilities, if she asked her body to do something, it would deliver.
2024 Sassafras is a different person. She no longer believes that her body will deliver, for it has spent the last nearly four years being unpredictable, unreliable, and sometimes downright nasty. She has significantly less energy to tackle any problem, and a lot less mental/psychic energy to focus on anything, good or bad.
She’s lost a lot of the confidence of that earlier Sass, and she doesn’t always believe in the goodness of humanity. Though she still believes in her own strength of will, when she can muster the energy to do it.
But those four years of bodily uncertainty, of feeling tossed about by LC like flotsam in a Nor’easter, of often not feeling like herself…
It has made her long for certainty. When your own body and mind are a tempest, you crave some respite from that tempest, a safe place to curl up away from the wind and waves and tumult.
In essence, 2018 Sass was totally at peace with impermanence—embraced it, even.
2024 Sass feels browbeaten by impermanence. While she’s had to internalize far more impermanence on a daily basis, she finds no joy in it. She’s often angry and resentful instead.
The power of choice, my lovelies:
2018 Sassafras chose to fling herself into that wild unpredictability.
2020 Sassafras did not get to choose LC, and 2024 Sassafras is reaping the sordid harvest from those seeds.
I’ve been resisting all these lessons in impermanence. Resisting them so hardcore because, damnit, I didn’t have any choice in this. I can be angry, resentful, bitter, stubborn, exhausted, wiped, sad, depressed…and while I can put a “here’s my silver lining” view on it and list out the self-knowledge and learning I’ve done as a result of LC, sometimes it just feels like window dressing.
But…everything is impermanent and ever-changing. I’ve been a meditation practitioner and sat with enough Buddhist thought to recognize this.
Up until today, I somehow hadn’t recognized that so many of my choices these last four years have been guided by this frustration with impermanence. I wanted my identities to be stable, but they weren’t. (They never are, I screech at myself as I write this. You fool!)
I stayed so long at my current job because I needed *something* to be stable and secure.
And on the flip side, I’ve been unable to change the things I’ve most wanted to change. I can’t will myself to full health, can’t push my body to do incredible challenges anymore. I spent almost two years trying to buy a house to have a stable home, submitted countless offers, and still we continue to live in the same rental since 2020.
If the universe was embodied as a single individual, it would be laughing at me right now.
Frankly, I’m laughing at me right now.
Oh, little part-time Buddhist, did you think this lesson would be easy? Did you think embracing impermanence would always be as easy as it was in 2018? Things don’t happen on your terms.
I can’t choose to recover from a chronic illness. I can’t choose for the fighting in Ukraine or Gaza to stop. I will choose to vote but there’s a good chance that my preferred candidate won’t win.
But there’s still choice here. I can choose to acknowledge that I’ve been making myself miserable these last four years by denying a lesson that I thought I’d learned in 2018: everything about life is impermanent.
Stop fighting against that. Embrace it, Sassafras.
I’m reading Frank Ostaseski’s insightful The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully right now, and it could not be more timely:
Impermanence is humbling. It is absolutely certain, yet the way it will manifest is completely unpredictable. We have little control. We can either shrink in fear from this predicament or choose a different response. (25)
Today, right now? This is me, choosing a different response.
I choose to embrace this impermanence as a true, honest gift.
Not stretching for a silver lining, not trying to construct a different story. But to honestly throw my arms and my heart wide open and accept this gift. As Ostaseski notes:
The gift of impermanence is that it places us squarely in the here and now. We know that birth will end in death. Reflecting on this might cause us to savor the moment, to imbue our lives with more appreciation and gratitude. We know that the end of all accumulation is dispersion. Reflecting on this might help us to practice simplicity and discover what has real value. We know that all relationships will end in separation. Reflecting on this might keep us from being overwhelmed by grief and inspire us to distinguish love from attachment.
Attention to constant change can help prepare us for the fact that the body will one day die. However, a more immediate benefit of this reflection is that we learn to be more relaxed with impermanence now. When we embrace impermanence, a certain grace enters our lives. We can treasure experiences; we can feel deeply—all without clinging. We are free to savor life, to touch the texture of each passing moment completely, whether the moment is one of sadness or joy. When we understand on a deep level that impermanence is in the life of all things, we learn to tolerate change better. We become more appreciative and resilient. (25)
Starting today, I am going to try to take this gift out of the box I received it in and figure out what to do with it.
For me, that will likely mean a few things:
Stop panicking about money and career
In the past, when I’ve been open to whatever weird possibilities presented themselves, I’ve ended up in better working situations. Now is the time for that level of openness.
Let go of these identities that LC has stripped from me
They were always going to be temporary, really, and continuing to dwell on them is forcing me to look backward or forward, but rarely where I’m at right now. Comparison is the thief of joy. Other true cliches.
Use the epiphany I had recently about flow state and work out from there. New identities will emerge (and themselves fall away, at some point).
Listen to my heart, not my head
During thru-hiking and its immediate aftermath, I felt so wide open and feeling. I haven’t turned that off, but LC has caused me to be a bit more closed in on myself, a lot more critical, and definitely less emotionally open.
The people I admire most are open and feeling and heart-driven people. I would like to be one of those people, and I can choose to be.
This chaos and uncertainty is amazing because it means I am alive
In the depths of LC, one day felt very like the next, and the brain fog and memory problems made it so that I quite literally couldn’t remember feeling any different.
I didn’t really have ups and downs from the outside world because I had to be turned so inward to just get through. I no longer have those constraints, yet part of me has been clinging to them, maintaining them.
There was a time for those coping strategies. I can be thankful for how they helped me survive when other LC patients gave up in despair, but I can also thank them and set them aside and choose a new forward. Coping mechanism KonMari. 😉
I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I am a wiser, more empathetic human as a result.
Thank you for sharing these insights from your journey with us!