The Good the Bad and the Ugly

I really really wish that I was only a super wonderful person. This is not a self esteem problem, this is a reconciliation to reality problem. Because although sometimes I am a super wonderful person, there are other times that I am neither super nor wonderful.

I would like to be only super and wonderful the same way that I wish that life were always happy and filled with the experiences that I seek each day instead of the ones that are trial some. I have noticed that most of us like to categorize everything into a good box and a bad box. We like to fill up and sit inside of the good box, while shooing away anything less than pleasant over and into the bad box, the one that we want to drive off and drop off at somebody else's house, preferably at one of those bad people's houses. But as far as I can tell, life is not only good or only bad, and neither are we. My observation is that all of us have beauty, all of us have blessings, all of us have pain, all of us have travails, and all of us behave in ways that we later regret, especially when we find ourselves caught in the wrong set of combined circumstances. Those times when unfortunate events seem to pile up on us in a way that makes us feel terrified or furious or out of control are like terrible storms that bombard our souls. Everybody gets caught in a storm now and then because there is no set of rules we can follow in order to avoid all of the pressures that life throws at us. President Clinton later referred to his infamous Oval Office sex scandal as a time in his life when he was under incredible external pressure that resulted in him winning a battle for the country while losing a battle for his family. We have all had moments when a storm blew in and our piles of sandbags were breached resulting in things that we loved getting washed away or damaged.

A few weeks ago Storm Sandy hit the East Coast of North America with a vengeance. Some terrible things happened in those communities as a result of a bizarre and random set of combined barometric pressures and powerful weather systems. But when you look at the image of Storm Sandy from space it is actually quite beautiful. How could something so destructive simultaneously hold a form a beauty? I think it is because every thing and every person has both an element of beauty and an element of ugliness, or a shadow. I don't like this fact of life because I only want to be beautiful. I only want to be the super and wonderful person that I am when life is running smoothly. I hate that I am also one of those bad people that I want to put in the bad box and send away to that bad person's house. I hate that I lose my temper. I hate that I have a jealous streak. I hate that I am self righteous and stubborn. I hate that I am incredibly self absorbed and at times insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. But so far as I can tell, this is life. Each of us like Storm Sandy are simultaneously beautiful and ugly. 

This concept of beauty with ugliness, light with shadow, can also transfer to the way we feel about the things in life that we automatically put into the bad box. One of my favourite pass times is people watching. Here in Gotemba we have an Outlet Mall, an ideal place for people watching. Shoppers come from Tokyo and other areas to spend the day buying things in a quiet and peaceful setting. A few weeks ago when I visited there with a friend I noticed a young couple with their only child. She was about ten years old and severely handicapped. They were having a day out as a family at the Outlet Mall, a place that their daughter's wheelchair could easily be pushed around. The mother was connecting her daughter's feeding tube as the other shoppers were going into the Food Court while avoiding looking at the handicapped child. This young couple had things that most of us would put into the bad box, a child so severely handicapped that she could not even be fed orally. Who would want that life? But as I watched the couple they were actually having a really wonderful day together as a family. It made me wonder about the secret beauty that might be hidden inside of that storm, the moments of love that they may be sharing with a very special little girl. I wondered about who that little girl had transformed her parent's into due to all of the physical challenges she faces every day. I wondered if perhaps these two people should actually be envied rather than automatically pitied. 

Later that afternoon I went into the Prada store. The items inside were undeniably gorgeous. I could not help but enjoy the beauty of the quality fabrics and designs. It would be impossible not to be excited to bring something home from that store as it would be an experience of owning and touching and having something beautiful. But while I was looking at the clothing I noticed that there was nothing in that store that would have actually fit my bodacious and curvy physique. Apparently Prada, as well as the other extremely expensive stores where we are supposed to envy the financial ability to shop in, do not have any clothing for a woman who has any other body type than that of a stereotypical display mannequin. Am I really supposed to wish that I could be this prototype of what has been culturally decided as desirable and elite? And why would I want to be in this elite social status when achieving what I am supposed to want looks to me like a tremendous amount of internal stress and pressure toward attempting a life style of perfection in order to look good to others. The constant attention and effort toward a supposedly perfect appearance that creates an experience of being envied by those with less social and economic power looked incredibly burdensome to me in that Prada store. I saw the shadow of having what is also beautiful. I would still love to own something from Prada and I am not saying that having beautiful things is less moral or undesired, I am only saying that there is also a measure of pain, a burden that comes with having what other people envy and that there is a dark side to every experience of light.

This made me wonder if we should automatically pity the parents of the severely handicapped little girl while envying the people who can afford and fit into the high end designer clothing? And if we might be wasting our time chasing an evasive kind of happiness while the most peaceful people on the Outlet Mall grounds are quietly connecting a feeding tube while being thankful for gently slanted concrete walkways? And is it possible that all of us are actually equal, that we are all having our own varied experiences of joys and sorrows, beauty and ugliness, light and shadows, whether it is coping with the emotional stress of self imposed pressure to attempt perfection or whether it is coping with the challenges of finding places you can easily walk around with a little person in a wheelchair? 

This makes me question my attitudes toward others, especially the bad people, as perhaps they are not the bad people at all. Perhaps they are simply people who have been caught in many terrible storms and not given enough love when they were young and vulnerable. And as much as I would only like to be one of the good people, I know that I am both beautiful and ugly. I am light and darkness. My self absorbed, stubborn, self righteous, and jealous streak is as intact as ever. Can I be reconciled to my own humanity and can I use it to give me more empathy toward the humanity of others? 

What kind of life can I create by including those things in my bad box, the things that make me sad, the unwelcome events, the things that I want to send away because they cause me pain? Maybe I need to stop trying to send that bad box away and start being grateful for those shortcomings and life heart aches because they help me to find joy in the little things, the things like the beauty of a full moon every month, the same way that the young couple at the Outlet Mall found joy in the smoothly raised cement walkways.

Maybe life is less about having things like relationships, security, or desired circumstances, and more about what we can create for ourselves and others by being a whole person, a person who accepts that they have good, bad, and ugly parts. Perhaps that is why I should not automatically pity the parents with the severely handicapped child, or envy the person who's lifestyle meets the target market of a Prada store. Neither life is all good or all bad, both are about becoming and about learning. Everybody's life experience has value and maybe accepting our own humanity and failures and life circumstances enables us to accept the humanity and failures and misfortune of others in order to create more forgiveness, compassion, and kindness in this world. Maybe the things in our bad boxes are our secret treasures. I like this idea. It makes getting cancer on your face seem pretty lucky.

link to seeing sandy from space

Being Naked with your Neighbours

Public bathing is part of the culture in Japan. Until a few decades ago many families did not have their own baths and showers. Each neighborhood had its own bath house and in the evening people made their way to it in order to get clean, to relax, and to catch up with each other about the day. Many of these bath houses still exist, and even though now families have their own bath tubs and showers, almost all Japanese families still take the time to go to onsen when they get the chance. The onsen bathing is segregated by sex, but children of both sexes can be found on either side.

For a Westerner, it is disorientating to be naked among strangers, and even more intimidating to bump into a person that you know. Ya, so this is me naked.....and apparently that is you naked..... maybe next time i will bump into you at the grocery store instead of here at the onsen where we are both naked....this kind of neighborly experience feels pretty awkward for a Canadian who always preferred to put my bathing suit on in a change room, and who learned very fancy ways to put on one item of clothing on while still wearing another, then taking off the first one after I had replaced it with the second one. I went to boarding school during junior high, so I have great skills at changing clothes without ever being seen naked. Those skills are wasted in Japan.

Not being one to miss out on opportunities to learn from another culture and to appreciate all of the things that other cultures get right, I have recently started to get into onsening. The most profound part of the experience of this activity that I find so intimidating is how it has affected my sense of adequacy versus inadequacy. When we onsen we cannot hide anything physical from one another. Being naked in public requires us to accept things about ourselves because in the presence of others there is not time to obsess over our imperfections as it would only draw more attention to them. When I am naked with my neighbors in a bath house, even though no words are spoken between us, I know that they know that I have had children, just like I can see the maps of stories written on their bodies.  The other women see my comparatively curvy build, and the dramatic cancer surgery scar across my face when they look into my light blue eyes, so different than their own. My body silently tells them that I am a bit of a war torn woman who once had a completely different life thousands of miles away from here and now she chooses to bathe with her new neighbors, to be a part of their world.

In the onsen I am different and I am flawed and nobody panics. There is peace among us. We are all adequate. We surround each other with thoughts of kindness and acceptance. In our ultimately vulnerable state I even become less afraid of aging, because when we are naked with our neighbors, together we inexplicably become more beautiful.

Website link to One of the local Onsens