Feeling Good

So often lately I catch myself smiling, not at any particular person or thing, but just at all that is. Or I sense that my eyes are wide open and bright, that I’m glowing, the spark of life shining out, vibrancy giving me a lightness in my step.

Some might think I’m in love. After all, it’s damn near Valentine’s Day.

And, yes, I am in love…though no one’s in love with me. I write that, not in the lovelorn way I uttered those words in 2003, when I was giddy and squishy after a man had kissed me following 15 years of waiting for him to realize I was a woman. I had asked my class to excuse my behavior and the little mistakes I was making on the board. “I’m in love, you see,” I told my students, and they giggled, pleased for me. Later, I confided in one of them, “Yes, I said I’m in love, but that doesn’t mean anyone is in love with me.” After several days, the kisser hadn’t called or e-mailed, much less sent roses. After a little bit more of this, I fell out of love too.

But what I’m currently feeling isn’t like this. It’s not like this at all. The emphasis is not on the absence of love coming my way, but that the love is non-specific, non-personal. No one loves me. Rather, all loves me. Love is coming at me from all directions.

If an outsider would take inventory of my life, he might say there’s no reason to be feeling so good.
• My health has been severely challenged lately.
• My support system is limited.
• My current job pays poorly, is often meaningless, doesn’t make use of my talents and intelligence, demands long hours, is conducted under shabby working conditions, and is plagued by passionless students, unsupportive co-workers and a back-stabbing department chair.
• My apartment is in a marginal part of town with neighbors who enjoy beeping their horns at all hours of the night.
• I have no social life beyond a coffee every month or two with a friend.

And yet when I am alone in my apartment or reading a book in a coffeehouse or walking down the street or getting my groceries, I feel good. I am ever-delighted by the beauty and peacefulness of ordinary objects and the empty air between them.

Quite often I am in my kitchen, preparing a meal or washing dishes, when I look into the adjoining living room at the desk chair in front of the computer. The chair becomes a boundary of sorts, but my vision is focused on the 20 feet or so between the chair and me. The longer I gaze at the air, the more I feel an animation of the space, or of space itself, the ground that allows things to be. I am in the presence of presence, the great I Am. I am happily drowning in the present moment.

Of course, when I am interacting with humanity, it is more difficult to maintain this presence. I’m still working on that. But in these pure moments of no-thought, love streams in.

And sometimes I am able to bring that peace into challenging situations with other humans. Sometimes. Like tonight when I received an e-mail from a friend who has moved from So Cal to pursue a new life in the idyllic Northwest. She had misinterpreted something I’d written, believing that I was judging her when I was truly expressing concern, hoping she was doing OK. Her e-mail calling me on this perceived judgment was surprising, but not unsettling, as it surely would have been a year ago or even six months ago.

I’m feeling good, but I couldn’t explain it to someone who calculates happiness by the number of one’s friends, the size of one’s paycheck, the existence of a significant other or the results of lab tests. When I’m completely in this moment, there’s no room for all of that, only room enough for what’s right here in front of me. And that includes the empty air.