I was sitting in my office near Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a spectacular fall day in New York City, clean and clear, and the jazz of my morning was playing: A couple of starlings were singing in the gingko tree, traffic helicopters hummed overhead, and my patient on the couch had established his theme and was working his way into a riff. Things seemed fine, as they often do when they’re not. They seemed more than fine, though there was a little more helicopter noise than usual.
It wasn’t until I got into the taxi on my way to the William Alanson White Institute and noticed my driver’s bug-eyed alarm in the rear-view mirror that I refocused and heard what he was hearing, the radio reports on the attacks on World Trade Center. One down, one to go.
I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some indication that now is the moment, a pivot point, when a key decision is to be made and, like most people, as I wait I’ve been that frog in the pot of slowly warming water, not noticing that soon it’s going to reach a temperature so high, things are going to go so far that I will no longer be able to make that change and jump out to, what? the cold wind of freedom?
Why do you think people usually stay put? Because everyone likes a warm bath.
I chose to take the hint that day. It was a hint from me, nothing objective about terrorism. In fact, New York is doing better now than ever before, my home office is probably worth three times what it was when I sold it later that year. The hint was this: You could die in your chair tomorrow. You could be one of those nice ladies on 93rd street who went on doing what was expected of her for reasons that everyone could enumerate.
When’s it time to take the big chance? When does dreaming kick in?
The joke is that I had no particular dream. I had to act on no dream. I had to act on sheer muscle memory and a sense of possibility. What I’ve come to understand about myself is the point isn’t a point. It’s not clarity, it’s not reason, it’s not an aha. It’s motion.
For some people movement is arrival. It’s where the process of going on being goes on. For me, if there’s no movement, there’s no music and if there’s no music, there’s no jazz.
Being a psychoanalyst was the closest I could get, sitting down, to being part of the ensemble. I was the listener. Now, there are plenty of literary critics who will talk your ear off about the constructive role of the listener, the viewer, how she makes something out of what’s out there. But I had to realize that I was not just a listener. After a certain point in my personal development, if I wasn’t moving the music, making the dance, I might as well have been deaf.
For some of us, movement often comes first, then, if you’re lucky, an impulse may come, or a feeling, or a picture in your mind. It’s hard to understand this if you’re a visual person, relying on the order of things and whether things look OK – to you, to them – but as a very young child I noticed it early. When I was running or hitting a ball or, later, when I was dancing, improvising, there was no order to follow, it was just now or nowhere. Oh, there was practice and refinements and scales on the piano. But when you’re playing it’s not 1, 2, 3,1, 2, 3, it’s just everything.
So I had to stop what I was doing. I had developed a routine but it no longer included me. Strangely, I had gotten so much better at being an analyst, it had gotten so much easier, that I became suspicious. Maybe my patients noticed it too, I don’t know. My practice had dropped in the previous months in the kind of expectable way that it does when you start with a lot of patients at the same time and then many start to finish at around the same time. But some might also have left because they noticed, perhaps unconsciously, that I wasn’t in the struggle with them the way I had been and although that is comforting to some patients, it’s very lonely for others
So instead of routinely refilling my practice as many do at that juncture, I started to shut it down. And by the time I was out of the office I was into a 1986 Airstream motorhome, towing a bright blue Mini CooperS and doing what comes naturally. Moving. Driving off into the sunset with no destination.
I told myself I’d be back in six months but I wasn’t fooling anyone but myself.
So that’s how I’ve come to see the most spectacular steps I’ve taken toward orienting to The Live Edge. But there are many small steps I continue to take each day, every day. At the time, it had to be a bold step toward something undefined and away from a lot of people and ways of life that I do miss. It was the start of a new life practice, a new habit, a commitment to myself to feel my way along.
The Live Edge by successive approximation.
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If I’d thought about it for second, I would have realized that someone who does what you do would get this. Immediately. Great comment: the unaimed arrow, following your nose. Maybe that’s why I have a big nose. Thanks, Pascal.
i was talking with a teammate as we did our warm down after a race (bike), and we were joking about how not into sports we are. we have no idea what the local professional teams are doing, people ask us with excitement, ‘did you see the game?’ – what game? we are usually forced to answer, and yet we spend almost 20hrs a week as participants in our sports. with two daughters requiring some form of traditional stability, both my wife and i feel pretty set for the time being, but w/o that form of participatory movement (actual and symbolic) we both race, we just couldn’t survive. but we often talk of new forms of movement, perhaps a new job and career path for her, perhaps something completely different for both of us (a bike shop, bike race promotion); perhaps our children will help set some of the necessary parameters in a few years time (the oldest of the two will soon go, away?, to college. i think that’s what people mean when they say they need goals, but as one of my favorite sayings goes, ‘goals can be deceiving, the unaimed arrow always reaches its mark’. so indeed, the arrow needs to be in movement, the goals are secondary, just as they were when you left ny jenny.