blahg, blahg, blahg…

[These are writing exercises. I pull a card out of a box, read what’s on it, write something related.]

Become the other person? Swap places with someone? Adapt the qualities of another? 

There seem to be many shows on television of late – not that I watch, but that I’ve seen advertised – that involve trading people, places or things. Swapping spouses, trading houses, somehow being or doing something that somehow allows the contestant to become something other than s/he or the family is in reality. (Oh… and then they call it “reality television”, but that’s another point all together.)

I wonder about the appeal of these shows, both for the participants and the audience. Do they provide some break in the humdrum of the ordinary? Is there a thrill in being someone else, if only for a little while? Is there some guilty pleasure met when you’re legitimately allowed to swap a spouse or a child or a neighbor for another? After all, it’s not really real. Just television. Right?

Or is it perhaps that it’s just downright easier to trade places with another person, to assume aspects of their life, rather than to change aspects of one’s own?

I work on a study that has the lofty goal of helping women achieve permanent lifestyle changes. It involves changing diet and exercise patterns, but even more, it involves changing an awful lot of other relationships that the women have; relationships with themselves, family, friends, and co-workers. It involves developing new relationships with the stresses of life, with the work of work, with how one deals with everything from caregiving for elderly parents to going out to dinner with the kids.

We all live with very ingrained thoughts and behaviors that develop within us over long periods of time. They’re hardly given up and/or replaced with others very easily, even if and when the others are better for us. No, I imagine it’s way easier to pack a suitcase and move in with the family next door, to assume all of their dysfunction rather than try to untangle the mess at home. On some level we all must believe this and that’s what makes it entertaining – both to watch and to participate in.

My doctor once said to me that the human body, for some mysterious reason, seems to like to exist with a certain amount of pain and discomfort. It actually, in an odd way, becomes comforting to be uncomfortable. Perhaps it just becomes familiar and it’s the familiarity that’s comfortable. But then, at the same time, there’s that craving to move next door. There’s that curiosity to be someone else, live someone else’s life, swap this for that. It’s a curious juxtaposition. 

Last night I led my study group through an exercise where we listed the pros and cons of (1) exercising and then (2) NOT exercising. We had things in all of the columns, but when we looked at the board afterward, we quickly saw that we’d been able to easily list many more pros for exercising and many more cons for not exercising than the other options. So then I asked, “If this is true, why do we so often get stuck here (pointing to the shorter lists)?”

And it’s true. That is where we get stuck. We get stuck with the familiar uncomfortable. We get stuck in the place where we long to become the other, but longing and becoming are two completely different things. One makes for good television. The other, sometimes, makes for good living.

I’ve been reading a good bit of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work lately, lots of lessons in mindfulness. Breathing, of course, is key to this exercise. Focusing on one’s breathing centers you, calms you, brings your attention to present. I know this is true. I’ve known this for years. But I’ve never seemed to be very good at actually practicing it. Trying again.

As I sit and breathe this morning, all I can really think of is the heat. The thought “there is no air in this room” crossed my mind when I sat down. Stifling hot. For New England, anyway. Riding on my scooter yesterday, the air reminded me of the water in Buck Pond where I’d just been swimming the week before. The air was filled with pockets of cool and then pockets of warm, just like a summer pond. I couldn’t recall ever having felt that sensation before outside of the water. Then again, it’s not something one would feel surrounded by a car. Yea for scooting!

Our kitchen smells like camping. The dishes have all been washed and re-packed, the tent aired out, the tarp dried, the sleeping bags separated, rolled and stuffed. All that’s left now is to put everything back on the shelves in the pantry where it will live until the next time. In the meantime, however, it all sits piled in the corner chairs and stacked neatly on the block table, emitting the lingering aroma of camp smoke, pine needles, and dirt.

Olfactory memory … is that what it’s called? We smell something and it triggers thoughts of a time or place or person or event. It can be quite powerful. There is a very distinct smell that rises from the industrial rubber flooring often installed in institutional stairwells; the stuff with the molded circles to prevent slipping that comes in all colors. It gives an off an odor that never fails to remind me of a library, specifically the stacks of my college library. Despite the fact that I actually work in a library every day, it’s that smell that brings to mind the comfort of such a place to me much more than the sights and the sounds and, heaven forbid, the work.

So I leave my vacation behind today and go back to work. We pack up the campsite, leave the slow pace and the quiet behind, return the gear to the shelves, and I return to the world that I share with other people, not just the inhabitants of nature. I feel the anxiety already. But before heading out the door, I think I’ll brush my sleeve against stuff bags one last time, to carry the smell – and all of the memories it evokes – with me through the day.