Stillability

I possess an uncanny ability to stay still for hours. Today I lay on my back in the middle of my bed watching a black speck of a bug wander aimlessly around our ceiling fan. Neither guilt nor hunger moved me. I preferred to stay in the indentation my body made in our Tempur-pedic mattress--left leg straight out, right leg splayed to the side bent at the knee, hands near my hips--looking like a surreal set of fours to anyone watching from above. I only moved when the mailman shoved my mail through the slot in my front door, causing my poodles to begin an assault of unnatural decibel levels. It was then I realized it was after three o’clock in the afternoon.

I spent the majority of my childhood alone. While I was creative in finding ways to entertain myself--using scraps of cloth to design clothes for my Barbie dolls, shoving my kitten into the elevator of my Barbie townhouse--I also learned instinctively that the more invisible I was, the less I had to endure my mother’s hangover rages. I remember one morning lying on my belly on the scratchy carpet of our hallway listening to my parents argue on the other side of the house. I couldn’t understand their words. I just listened to the sounds of their voices and watched the shadows on our foyer walls in a semi-sleepy trance until my mother passed by on her way to the kitchen and said something caustic that drew me from my peaceful pose. I learned many years later that the kitchen is where she hid her booze.

What causes me at the age of forty, not four, to continue to be more comfortable in stillness than action? Why will I forego food and even Starbucks coffee to contemplate the water stains on my bedroom ceiling? Is this any different than drinking myself into a stupor or getting high to avoid my life? I have lost an entire Saturday never to be regained! I blame my poodles. They are too happy to snuggle under the covers all afternoon. Soft and warm little bodies curled up, snoring quietly beside me. Now, come on! That’s just not fair.

Okay, seriously, what drives one person to roll up their sleeves and push on and another person to stand stock-still? My partner and I are in the middle of remodeling our kitchen. We had to fire our contractor and now believe we will finish this project on our own. The result is a disparate collection of used and donated items filling our already tiny home and two full-sized refrigerators standing in our dining room. To navigate from our living room to our kitchen and the back door, you must shimmy sideways between appliances, carefully avoiding falling into piles of unidentifiable debris. While I find this adventurous, my partner has reached her tipping point in annoyance. The empty fridge must go.

“Go where?” is the natural question, and “The driveway!” becomes the only answer. While my partner prepares herself upstairs by putting on shoes or some other refrigerator-moving-appropriate outfit, I pull on the dog blanket that is under this particularly large appliance and manage to slide it across our hardwood floor until it blocks the view of our front door. “Look at me! This is fun!” Of course, no real work has been expended yet.

The doors of the refrigerator have been removed and, when turned sideways, the fridge allows a sliver of light to enter on either side of our front doorway. At this point I am standing outside--having managed to wrench the dog blanket up over the threshold while my partner pushes from behind--staring up at this enormous structure teetering ominously over the four-inch drop to our tiny concrete front porch. Behind me are five more concrete steps down to the front walk. Wait a minute! How is this going to work? I am no longer pulling. I am standing still, eyes wide in terror, images dancing through my mind of the fridge at the bottom of the steps with my hands and feet sticking out from under it like the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house landed on her. And I’m not wearing valuable ruby slippers, either!

We are at an impasse. She is full speed ahead, and I am stone-still. No way! We can’t do this ourselves. Neither one of us stands over 5’4” tall and this thing outweighs us both combined! But this doesn’t even slow her down. Now, she’s just angry with me for abandoning her in the middle of our project. She will find a way to get this behemoth out of our doorway and down to our driveway!

Needless to say, I survived this story, thanks to a kind neighbor and a dolly. However, this small life event wouldn’t leave me. Why, in the face of conflict or perceived danger, does my stillability kick in? Hands off like touching a hot stove. Back away! This is different from lying in bed all afternoon, of course, but I am convinced they are related. When faced with an entire day and so many things to attend to, I simply didn’t rise to the occasion. Quite literally, I did the opposite of rise. I sank.

One of the things I am supposed to be attending to is writing. This is why I chose to go to school, to be a writer, but even this does not stir me from my lethargy. B.Nina Holzer in A Walk Between Heaven and Earth believes that creative writing takes time:

I do not mean just the time that you sit at the desk, but the time it takes for dreaming the new child into manifestation. The creative process is a gestation process, and it cannot be pushed. You need time to sit around, do nothing, stare into space, dream, and play--all the while some mysterious process is going on inside you, long before you are ready to write. (pp.15-16)

See, I cannot be pushed! I am the refrigerator in the doorway looking at my first four-inch drop. Let’s not even discuss the five steps beyond that! I am gestating, in transition. Mysterious processes abound! I am not bothered by having to search my entire house for a plastic fork to eat with or having to tip-toe between stacks of dishes on my bedroom floor because we have no cabinets yet in which to store them. This is the awkward, somewhat painful place that precedes true change. I cannot force a fix.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut for the first time. How sad that he passed away a year before I discovered him, but his voice continues and fills me with joy. In A Man without a Country he wrote, “Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming” (p. 130). He was probably at least eighty-one years old when he wrote that! Not in control. Simply becoming. And he had over forty years on me!

I think that’s exactly where I am. Becoming. And it’s a messy process. But messy doesn’t seem to bother me. At least not right now. Of course, my partner and I are not in the same place, so I may not have as much time to gestate quietly in the muck as I would prefer. Her stillability is severely impaired. We’ll have to work on that.

© 2008, Robin L. Bernstein, All rights reserved