2006: Openness

This is a slightly edited piece I wrote last year. It’s appropriate once again, for this time of year.

Angel Cards. Last year I picked Harmony. This year I picked Openness.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I am way too superstitious for resolutions. At least not to fall into the trap of making them for the year ahead. I hate New Year’s anyway. In general. The relentless insistence on joy and optimism on that one night goes up my ass. It’s alienating. What if you’ve had a rough year? How do you KNOW it will be a Happy New Year? Does just sayin’ it make it so? Also: is “happiness” the be-all end-all of all emotions? I certainly don’t think so. I like other words much better. I guess I dont’ like celebrations where there’s some expectation that you should be in a certain mood. The way New Year’s is currently celebrated is with alcohol, party hats, and screaming and jumping up and down with the clock turns over. Nothing more alien to my Sheila sensibility could be imagined. My sensibility leans toward the contemplative and mildly melancholy, actually – especially during a moment when time is marked off like that. I like to reflect, look back, etc. So I like to be in an atmosphere on that night where it isn’t WEIRD that you aren’t drunk and PSYCHED. Where it isn’t weird that you’re kind of quiet, and contemplative.

(How weird. In my surfing around the web this morning – AFTER I wrote this piece – I came across this piece from Ann Althouse. Very a propos – freakily a propos!)

So no. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. But I do do Angel Cards.

What are Angel Cards? Angel Cards can be bought in any new age-y type store (you know, the kind of store that sells books about yoga, kama sutra, and holds classes on meditation and compost heaps. I got my deck of Angel Cards at a store like that in the Village). The cards come in a very small box, and the cards themselves are very small – probably an inch and a half long, and on each card is a different word. Some of the words on the cards (and I don’t know all of them): Power. Love. Joy. Enthusiasm. Kindness. Stuff like that. I keep my Angel Cards on a shelf on my desk, and if I’m ever feeling lost or scared about something … or like I need guidance, I’ll pick an Angel Card. It’s not a literal sort of “today you will win the lottery” kind of command, like you find in most daily horoscopes. The angel cards put you in a contemplative inward-looking space. There is silence surrounding each card – a silence filled with meaning – but you must be silent, in order to hear the message. You have to look within. If you are having a rough day – and you pick Joy – how should you interpret it? Well, that’s up to you. Perhaps it’s trying to make a space for joy, even in the midst of the rough-ness. Perhaps it’s a reminder of how much joy there actually is – even when you’re stressed out or sad. Perhaps it is another way of saying, “Hang on. This too shall pass. You will feel joy again. You will feel joy again.” No right answer here – the cards are meant to guide you. It’s not a guessing game.

Here’s a couple examples of what they look like:

For many years, my group of friends from college have a tradition of “picking Angel Cards” at the end of each year. It is “our word” for the next year. My friend Liz keeps a running tally of what everyone picks. She’s obsessive – she whips out her notebook and writes it all down – and she is able to read out what you picked LAST year. She’ll say, “Okay, so you picked Strength last year, and this year you picked Synchronicity.” So then you can look back over the last year … and see if “Strength” played a part … and what “Strength” might mean. Did you need strength? Did you discover how strong you already were?

Of course you can place any meaning you want to on the Angel Cards. You can place NO meaning on what “your word” means. You can look at it like: This is something I need to “work on”. Or you can look at it like: this is just a word to meditate on, and see what it might provide me. Whatever. It’s completely up to interpretation. There are no rules. (I mean, how ridiculous would it be to have strict rules about how to pick Angel Cards of all things??) The whole point is to relax, to pick your word, to think about it …

There have been many interesting Angel Card moments through the years.

For example:

Years ago, a friend of mine picked “Trust”. This word pissed him off (things can get pretty emotional during the Angel Card picking ritual). He didn’t like “Trust”. He was highly scornful of the word. He felt scolded by the word and kept saying, “I have plenty of Trust. I don’t have a problem with Trust. This is bull shit, I’m picking another one.” And the next card he picked was “Flexibility”.

We are still making fun of him for that one.

I have a tendency to be relatively bitter about the Angel Cards, which can make for comedic and stressed-out Angel Card-picking moments. I refuse to give the word too much meaning, I refuse to take it TOO literally. I’ve had a rocky road these last 10 years. I hesitate to find too much meaning in things. I hesitate to get all googly-eyed about coincidences, and stuff like that. Been there, done that, have the bruises on the ole heart to prove it. Nope. The transformation is kind of amazing – when you consider that I was a major Richard Bach FANATIC in high school, and truly believed in all that New Age stuff, I was a card-carrying member of the soulmate industry. And now? I write long-ass essays (here and here and here) about the MALARKEY of the soulmate industry. The SCAM of it. The BULL SHITE of the whole “soulmate” thing in the first place!! heh heh If you had told my romantic 17 year old self, poring through Bridge Across Forever for the gazillionth time, that such a transformation would come to pass – I would have found it tragic. I would have been disbelieving. But indeed – it is now so!!

The Angel Cards have been under the same kind of umbrella. No more looking for meaning. At least not like that. No more looking for “signs”. No more latching onto some stupid Angel Card as having any meaning. I USED to, but NO MORE. As I have said many a time to my girlfriends, “I got BURNED by those Angel Cards, man!”

Here’s what happened.

It was 5 or 6 years ago. I was in Chicago for New Year’s. I was in a really good and positive place in my life. I felt really excited, really positive about the future … not just about my career and stuff, but about the possibility of letting love into my life again. For 3 or 4 years, I had put the old heart on ice after a particularly bad loss. Also, I was in grad school, and busy, and focusing on other things. But what was really going on was that I could not recover from the loss. On some level I refused to recover. Years passed. And while I definitely was wounded, torn up, a huge part of myself LEFT OVER THERE WITH HIM – how could I get it back?? – anyway, despite all of that – life moved on. As it does.

And on this particular New Year’s Eve I’m talking about, I was back in Chicago, I was doing really well, and I don’t know what it was … it was like there was something stirring in the ice fields … Little green sprouts coming up or something. I felt that I could love someone again. It had been years. I had no prospects, not even a crush on anyone … It was just this sense, this kind of emotional sense, that I was ready. I could do it. My last love would not be the last man I loved.

So then comes the Angel Card picking ritual. I was with my dear friends Jackie and Jim. We each picked a card. Funnily enough, Jackie had just found out she was pregnant for the first time. And the card she picked said Expectancy. We loved that!

And the word I picked, unsurprisingly, was Love.

Plain and simple. Love.

Jackie and I had been talking, in depth, about our lives (my favorite kind of New Year’s celebration, in case you haven’t guessed) – we talked about our struggles, our joys, our excitements – I shared my sense that good things were coming … that a relationship might be in my future, in my near future … and I hadn’t felt that in years – so then there was my word: Love.

I felt that my Angel Card affirmed my dearest hope.

In looking back, I can say to myself: There are many different kinds of Love. It could mean Love of self, it could mean Love of the work that you do, Love at its most universal. Goodwill towards men, etc. But I had been so burned in love, I was so lonely, so hurt, so at a loss as to what to do, who to be … that I thought I knew what “Love” referred to. Yup. I know it. Love is coming. I saw what I wanted to see.

Sadly, the following year was one of the bumpiest roughest years of my life. By the end of the year, I felt bruised, battered, roughed around … I felt like: Jesus, let this year END.

I had two very brief relationships. One with a great guy who I liked very much. He pursued me like gangbusters, and the second he had me, he dropped me. Such a cliche, but still – I was completely thrown by it, I am not cavalier or casual about who I let into my life – and I really liked him, I let him in, and boom – he disappeared. I was hurt, sure, but my hurt was way out of proportion to the relationship, but that didn’t matter. I had been protecting myself for so long, barricading up the heart, that I suppose somewhere I felt, naively, that when I did decide to come out of the cloister, things should work out for me, because it’s only fair and right. The scales would be balanced. The breakup of this 2 month relationship was crushing to me. I was devastated. My friends were worried about me. But you know how it goes. Eventually I did “bounce back”. Mainly by getting pissed off and toughening up. A necessary change, yes, but oh how much was lost in that transfer. Once you harden up so much, it’s very very hard to get soft again. That was the year when I got HARD and INTOLERANT. I had to.

And then another guy came into my life, that same year – maybe 4 or 5 months after the breakup of the other relationship. So I was on my way to recovery. This new guy was an Irishman. Another strange thing: I dated him for only 6 weeks. SIX WEEKS. But the impact of it. It made me scared of dating for good. I obviously can’t handle it. It was a very innocent kind of dating: we went to movies, we went out for sushi, we drank beer in a local pub – all that kind of dating stuff that I was so out of practice in. It was so much fun. And we clicked. We had an absolutely marvelous time with each other. And even though I dated him for a very short time, I would say that, of all the guys I have loved, many of whom I had much more elaborate relationships with – that lasted much longer – he is the guy I can’t think about. To this day. I can’t even say his name. It brings back that freezing horrible winter when he suddenly dropped me. He just stopped calling. Avoiding me. Typical dating bullshite, but like I said – I can’t handle it. I became a complete lunatic. I lost weight. I lay in bed, literally writhing in psychic pain. I can’t even write about it without feeling a small echo of it come back. Finally, I got closure with it – only through my own dogged persistence. I HAD to get closure. I was a wreck until I had spoken to him. So we spoke. It was a good conversation. He explained. I understood. I told him I understood. I wished him luck. We hung up.

Then began the winter of my discontent.

I thought I was going mad. I remember that my whole face changed. I wasn’t IN my face anymore. I only realized this later, when I came out of it. I made things worse for myself. I was SO harsh with myself. I was unforgiving, brutal. I was mad at myself for coming out to play – for taking risks – for allowing myself to be put in a situation where I could be hurt again. I had been SAFE! After the Chicago Disaster, I retreated – and yeah, I was lonely, but I was SAFE! Look what the hell happens when I emerge … I had to have been the stupidest person in the world.

During the winter of my discontent there was no logic. It was all lying in bed at night, with the wide-open eyes of a suffering animal. I was in agony.

I still can’t really think about that time.

I am coming back to the Angel Cards now.

That year, in the middle of this horrible time in my life, I went to a small New Year’s gathering at my friends David and Maria’s house. There were only 4 of us there, all dear friends. One of them broke out the Angel Cards. I was not doing well at this point, I was not sleeping, I looked like crap, I told my friend Ann Marie that I was limping through my days “like a wounded fox”. (“Wounded fox” has now become shorthand for us. “So I’m really sad right now, but I’m not a wounded fox.” “Oh, that’s good.”) I was VERY anti-Angel Cards.

Especially because I had picked LOVE the year before. I couldn’t get that out of my mind. LOVE! What a fucking LAUGH! I had to have been CRAZY to believe that I would find Love. What was I – a fucking Pollyanna? A fucking idiot? I believed it, and now look what happened – I got burnt. TWICE IN A ROW. I had to have been fucking INSANE to believe that damn card.

I resisted. “I don’t want to pick Angel Cards. I just … I don’t want to this year …”

My friends were kind and sweet. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, Sheila … it could just be a word that you can look to for guidance … ”

So I picked a card. Under protest.

What did I get?

I got Surrender.

And what did I then do?

In a fit of rage, I threw the card across the room. Tears streamed down my face. “Surrender? Jesus Christ, I HAVE surrendered – How much more do I have to fucking surrender? I HATE ANGEL CARDS.” Ahhh … don’t you want to have ME at your New Year’s Eve bash? Yeah, man, I’m a barrel of laughs.

I know I’m telling this like it was amusing … and we do sort of laugh a bit about me freaking out about my Angel Card – sort of, but not really. That time was so bad (and I know in the grand scheme of things, having 2 breakups in a row is not too terrible, whatever – but remember: this blog is just my diary. This is a diary entry. All I can do here, all I want to do here, is tell what happened – this isn’t an op-ed column, or an essay in some journal where I need to color my words a certain way, in order to be palatable to a wide readership or show both sides – what have you – I have tried to keep the self-deprecation to a minimum here. So back to the point:) That time in my life was so bad, just emotionally – not circumstantially – and I was so submerged in sadness, that although the memory of Sheila whipping an Angel Card across a room is … to put it mildly … comedic … and we do reference the moment on occasion – “Jeez, remember when Sheila threw Surrender across the room and started screaming?” But when we laugh, we do so still remembering how that time was for me. My friend David said that when he hugged me good-bye that night, he felt my sadness literally coming off my skin. He said to me as he hugged me, “Sweetheart… I know … Fuck the Angel Cards. I know.”

Of course, time did its imperfect job and I got over my Irishman. Not completely since – for whatever bizarre reason – he is still a painful memory and I can’t reference him casually. “Oh member when I was seeing so-and-so?” Ouch. No. So I did my best. I rigidly put him out of my mind. I joined a gym. I battoned down the hatches. I let go of sadness and I let in RAGE. I refused to write about him, think about him, reference him … and soon he was out of my heart. Enough so that I could move on.

Funny. Only in looking back on it can I see that all of that was part of “surrender”. Which, actually, I DID need to do. I needed to stop trying to control events. I needed to “surrender”. God. How weird. I still feel … all those old emotions of that time … in writing about this. How MUCH I resisted “surrender” was exactly how much I needed to ‘surrender’. But you could not have told me that at the time. I threw the damn card across the room.

Last year, my group of girlfriends had our Angel Card picking ritual. We were at the Art Bar in the Village. Liz always brings the Angel Cards, and also brings her little sheet of paper where she has all of the Angel Cards we all have picked throughout the years. heh heh I love Liz.

Another small set-up to this:

The day before I had woken up and began an essay that I wanted to post on the blog. It was brought on by seeing Something’s Got to Give – one of my favorite movies. I started an essay – and it was on Trust and Patience. Basically, if there is a reason I was put on this earth, if there is a method to the madness, then I think I was put here to learn trust and patience. That is my journey. It is all about Trust and Patience. I can’t trust. I have no patience. These are the themes. And Something’s Got to Give is all about this.

I am sure you can see where I’m going with this.

There was the pile of Angel Cards on the table. I reached out and picked one.

It said Harmony.

I didn’t like this. But I basically despise Angel Cards since the one-two punch of Love and Surrender – so I hate whatever I get. I said, “Harmony. Blech. I don’t like that” and tossed it back onto the pile.

And my tossing of Harmony caused another Angel Card to spontaneously turn over … and that card said Patience.

BWAHAHAHAHA

We were howling about this, because I had shared with my friends my thoughts about trust and patience earlier in the night. And so there I was – rejecting Harmony, but then there was Patience, inserting itself into the dialogue. “Hi there. You may not like Harmony, but you do need me!!”

I felt strangely comforted. I felt a vestige of what I used to feel during such rituals. I was not taking the cards literally, because I learned my lesson, with the one-two punch of Love and Surrender, thankyouverymuch.

But still. There are worse things in life than meditating on Harmony and Patience, and thinking about what these two words/qualities can provide me in the coming year, what they can mean to me.

Kerry said, laughing about the Patience moment, “Do not mess with the cards – They will always win!”

Oh, and directly following the Harmony/Patience thing, Liz picked her card and it said TRUST.

So Trust AND Patience both showed their faces that night, on the very same day I had been thinking almost non-stop about those two very things.

Coincidence? I choose to think not.

Like Albert Einstein said (and I paraphrase): “There are two ways to go through life. One is to decide that nothing is a miracle, and one is to decide that everything is a miracle.”

2005. A year of Harmony and Patience. How do I feel about that? What are my thoughts? Harmony? How did Harmony work through my life? DID it work through my life? Lots to think about.

And last week, my group of friends had our yearly get-together. Angel Cards picked. In the middle of a smoky LOUD bar in Jersey City.

My word for 2006: Openness.

And for the first time in YEARS – I saw the word – I saw my chosen Angel Card – and my eyes filled up with tears. Tears of … hope … validation? A softness – as opposed to a hardness. Am I open? No. Do I want to be? Is it a worthy pursuit? Is it worth the risks?

Still no answers to those questions. We’ll just have to see how it goes when the time comes. The easy answers are: “Of course it’s better to be open than closed” or “Of course you want a mate! Of course!” But why “of course”? You cannot know what is in my heart, or what is in anyone else’s heart. Especially if all you are able to do is look at their life through the limited filter of your own experience. We all do this to one another.

I love this bit from Longfellow:

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows,
which the world knows not; and oftimes
we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

People who are naturally optimistic and who find it easy to be happy oftentimes cannot understand the darker ones among them. They get frustrated with us. They think it’s easy – because it’s easy for THEM. They cannot understand that for some people it is a conscious act of WILL to join the human race, to be happy, to be open. It is hard for some of us. And their insistence that it’s easy makes things 100% worse.

This is why Tennessee Williams, when asked for his definition of happiness, replied “Insensitivity.”

I could think about that quote forever and still not get tired of thinking about it.

An old flame of mine said to me once, wonderingly, “Sheila, you’ve got a book of men in your heart.” He kind of admired it. Even though he couldn’t do it himself, and even though he said it with a sort of chastened knowledge about – the sadness that that must bring me, from time to time. He was such a nice guy. He “got it”. And to try to change this part of me would be like … square peg/round hole land. Not just difficult – but damaging. Psychically.

There will be those who will not understand. Who will read my words about “happiness” here and feel the need to argue with me. In my opinion, those people don’t “get it”. They just don’t. I have my own reason for being the way I am, and alot of us don’t mind living with a little bit of uncertainty. With a little bit of mystery and contemplation. With frailty.

Let’s look at that Longfellow quote again:

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows,
which the world knows not; and oftimes
we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

I try to remember that, when dealing with my fellow man. It is tough, man. It really is. But I try.

Oftimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

Openness.

I like contemplating it. I don’t like BEING it – and, in general, I am NOT open – except on the blog and on the stage – but I do like contemplating the word. Cautiously. Contemplating what the word might provide me in the year to come.