Basically Never

Much of the time in these months since my mother died, coming up on nine of them, and once I got past the initial phase of trying to think my way to a decision about moving to Michigan or not (the brute force method), I have felt that either choice will be fine and I have occasionally also remembered that these aren’t the only two choices on earth; there are probably 50 things I could do that would be fine. It’s a nice feeling.

But every once in a while, I snap over into the shadow side of that, in which it seems that either choice will be terrible. This is what happened in the past week, and it was awful, and I am glad it has faded away again, which happened after I accepted the fact that I was going to be beset with anxiety every minute for the rest of my life and simply tried to notice where I was feeling it in my body. I did not feel that anxiety at all today.

My mind is an unreliable friend, refusing to stick with any given story for very long. The noise of my neighbors in their apartments in the building I live in in San Francisco and the shouts of the soccer players in the park outside the window—is that annoying or is it nice to have those sounds of life nearby? (One practical consideration: If I fell and yelled for help in San Francisco, someone would hear me. In Ypsilanti, the mailman would have to smell rotting dead flesh before anyone realized something was wrong.)

The profound quiet in my bedroom in Ypsilanti: Is that peaceful and restorative or is it desolate and lonely?

The mental list of what I’d have to do to relocate is long and daunting:

Prepare the house to receive cats, in terms of supplies. Two litter boxes, two water bowls, two food bowls, two “moats” for the water bowls (square metal baking pans with water and a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid in them, to keep ants out of the drinking water), bags of cat litter, two poop scoopers, bags of dry food, cans of wet food, two forms of gabapentin (capsules for Marvin, tablets for Duckworth), two forms of Prozac (ditto), two or more flavors of Pill Pockets (no salmon for Marvin, any kind for Duckworth), psyllium (so as not to have overly firm poop), FortiFlora (so as not to have overly wet poop), and Nulo lickable treats (for the occasional medication crisis).

Prepare the house to receive cats, in terms of some minor renovations and one kind of major one: building a “cat lock” outside the front door—a new outer wall with a door in it so that if the cats got out the front door, they wouldn’t be entirely outside.

Quit my job. That’s a hard one.

Liberate sufficient assets to pay my sisters for their shares of the house.

Have a legal document drawn up re financial arrangement with sisters.

Find someone to help move the cats.

Move the cats. My giant worry.

Move my stuff. My second most giant worry. The internet says not to use a moving service. Everyone likes PODS. I guess you’re supposed to rent blankets from U-Haul, and then hire some people to wrap up your furniture and put it in the POD. I guess you’d have to apply for a permit to reserve a parking place or two on the street for the POD. Then I guess you’d have to hire some other people to unload the POD at the far end of the move.

Then I’d have to terminate my health care in California, find the same in Michigan, get Michigan ID, and find a doctor, a vet who is on board with all the cats’ medication, a chiropractor, and someone to cut my hair.

Plus there are all sorts of little things to be done in the house, like hooking up my drinking water filter.

It seems like a lot. I read not long ago that if something seems daunting, it’s because we haven’t broken it into small enough pieces. I guess I could do these things. I guess I might not be the first person ever to move across the country.

My idea about the clock worked wonderfully this morning. In case you already forgot my excellent idea, it was to use the alarm on a little freestanding clock instead of the alarm on my iPhone, which makes it all too easy to pick my phone up from the bedside table and look at it for hours if I can’t sleep. I thought maybe the alarm would be loud and jarring, but it was a quiet little peep-peep-peep that becomes louder if it is not shut off. Usually I turn off the alarm on my phone and then, since the phone is now in my hand, check my email, check my text messages, and often do Wordle right away and send the results to my Wordle buddy, inspired by her almost always already having sent me her results.

It was great to have the phone not reachable and therefore not to do all of those things right away.

After breakfast, I took a walk, and then I went to a birthday for an extremely cute little relative of mine who turned one today. It was a gorgeous day. The party was in Rockwood, MI, which entailed driving through Flat Rock. It took about 40 minutes. 

When I pulled up in my car, with license plate MTLHEAD, I was astounded to see that RCK HATER was parked in front of me! (Though could that possibly somehow be a reference to the name of the town or the neighboring town?)

It was a very nice party, with delicious pizza and tables set up under a big tent in the driveway. There were maybe 40 people there, including about 12 one-year-olds. The honoree is the first grandchild of my cousin. My cousin was there, and my uncle and his wife, and my cousin’s two sons and their wives.

I walked around and introduced myself to several people. I realized that, thanks to my cousin’s sons both having gotten married, and one couple having gone so far as to have this very cute baby, it greatly expands my pool of relations, however complicated it becomes to draw the connections: This is my cousin’s son’s wife’s grandmother! She is not actually “my” anything, and yet, most delightfully, she now belongs to me in some way.

I am continuing to practice in the style of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. I brought one of his books along and usually read a bit each day. I read something yesterday about a yogi saying she could not believe what she realized after just 15 or 20 minutes of continuous mindfulness. Not ferocious focus with gritted teeth, which would be ineffective and also tiring, but just remaining tuned in. Just the awareness needed to know “I see a tree” or “I’m holding this book.” Yet how challenging it is to maintain that for even ten seconds, for me, anyway. I can’t do it when doing formal sitting meditation, let alone at any other time, but I was kind of inspired by that 15- or 20-minutes thing, so every time I asked myself today, “What is awareness doing right now?”, which I ask myself quite frequently, I then tried to stay tuned in, but basically never did.