Managing My Reputation

Lately I feel like I’m lying when I talk to most people, in most situations. When it comes to how I am doing, what my experience is. I don’t know how to summarize it. But the other layer of it is I feel a sensitivity to how it will come across. Sometimes I feel a kind of pressure to acknowledge the absolute hellscape that seems to be many (most?) parts of the world right now, when asked about how I am.

I feel worried that if I say I feel an astounding expansiveness and joy and appreciation during the majority of each day lately, it will seem rude or insensitive or oblivious, etc.

I also feel grief at the suffering occurring. I feel the sharp pain of impotence in most situations across the planet where there is so much suffering. I also feel a peacefulness, behind or surrounding, enveloping that pain. There’s a sense of such a rainbow of feeling rolling through at all times. I think it’s always been that way but I’m aware of it more? I can’t tell! But when someone says, how are you? Or, how is your morning? I’m overwhelmed at how many things I could say, and none of them would quite capture it. I have this feeling of being able to go so deep into encountering something - various (so many! magnificent!) trees on the commute to my kids’ schools, for example. Marveling at a person running. Steeping in birdsong. Watching the legs of a commuter in front of me spin their bike. Opening my kitchen cupboard to get out a glass. Waiting on hold with my bank to talk to a person instead of AI. Stopping my bike and getting off and squatting to look at my kids and helping them resolve a conflict, reacting — imperfectly, I might add — to my older kid’s new sarcasm.

It’s all so amazing, such a miracle. There is no moment that is exempt from being a miracle. The sensation of knowing this truth in my body is highly enjoyable.

SO MUCH is happening, and I feel I’m not missing any of it. (This doesn’t mean I’m not aware of plenty! I just don’t have the sense of missing my life. I don’t have the sense of it going by so fast, even when I’m moving quickly. I feel the cherishing of it. I don’t feel this is something I am doing because of any merit, or even that “I” am really doing it. I just feel it is happening, and I’m beyond grateful.) So I feel peace and a lot of joy, but I’m not confused that this is because of circumstances. It’s not because I’m not aware of the suffering. I feel strangely so much more able to contact and be aware of suffering and feel it at a new level of depth.

So back to where I started, this social pressure to not be happy or express joy because it might be confused as an ignorance to, or ignoring of, others’ suffering.

It’s not that important, on one level, if I feel I am lying. Like all language is inadequate, all the time. And yet I also want to share language as close to the truth as I can get. Because if we all just share that we’re consumed by the horror show of life, that leaves no room for a way out of it. We’re just managing our reputations, and that is the truth of what I am doing when I don’t say anything about this miracle of a shift in my awareness in this mysterious season of my life. Reputations are not irrelevant, they do matter at one level, but spending my life force managing my reputation leads me pretty quickly to disconnection and existentialism.

So my experiment going forward is, when someone asks how I am doing, to at least just say, “good,” if that is what I am feeling in that moment, and not succumb to the pressure I feel to add a caveat to that.

I’m curious about what this feels like to you — I would love to hear if you have anything to say about managing your own reputation — please write to me if you feel like it!

Also, I was writing about doubt, and I’m not really sure this has to do with doubt, but it’s what arose today to share. xoxox