Sunday, October 14, 2012

Laundry

High ceilings: a clean bare apartment, in the modern, comfortless style. The floor-to-ceiling windows, which might have looked out over the city lights, were covered with matte black shades. The books were few and serious: T.C. Boyle, Jared Diamond. The effect was elegant but lonesome.

So also was the young woman, who had no fund of smalltalk, nothing to expose or to apologize for. One of those rare clients who seem to go nowhere during a massage, who stay warily present and alert. You ask them if they're comfortable and they answer at once and clearly, with the same readiness and tone they would use in a job interview. I sometimes wonder if the pheromones are simply wrong, with such clients. Have I done something wrong, or failed to do something right? I'll never know, but I'll be astonished if she calls me again.

I pondered the massage, and my responses, as I drove home. I sometimes feel a little awkward with clients that much younger than I am. They come from a different world. When I was young there was much solemn discussion and hand-wringing about the generation gap, but it seems to me that the distance separating me from young people now is far greater than the one that separated me from my parents. My parents and I grew up dabbling occasionally in despair. But these young people grew up immersed in it, they live and breathe it. They believe in nothing, and they have never trusted anything enough to be betrayed by it. My heart aches for them.

Or possibly it aches for myself, and all this has nothing to do with her. I need to bear that possibility in mind, too. As I drove through the rainy night, I went methodically through my heart, labeling the potentially toxic responses and putting them up to dry. Here was my dismay at being treated formally and distantly; here was my anxiety about being old and fat; here was the millionth iteration of the story of my only being able to talk my game; here was the faint but insistent conviction that my body is awkward and de trop; here was the sense that my tongue is thick with some ancestral poison, which prevents me ever from expressing the kindness and generosity that overflows my heart. I hung them carefully, one by one, with the clothespins of the dharma. Let them hang like prayer flags, till they turn to powder and fly with the wind.

This, I feel, is my great qualification for doing massage. All of us who work along the boundaries of intimacy, doing massage or talk therapy, need this capacity above all others: to be able to see our own responses, and not believe in them – not ratify them – and certainly not impute them to the people we work with. Nothing needs to be done with them. They don't need to be accepted or rejected, evaluated or justified. They just need to be given proper ventilation: they'll disintegrate on their own.

Underneath it all is a floor of heat and fire, that ancient, inarticulable potency, the thing that all prayer invokes. We can't afford to smother that with damp laundry. Hang it up and let it dry.

9 comments:

alembic said...

I hear you about the chasm across the generations and how it was for us. But more than that, I want to thank you for this beautifully written post. It brought some fire to my morning that was a little too damp.

Unknown said...

This is a lovely post. The examination of our human awkwardness. As an older therapist I have felt and processed through similar thoughts.

Kat said...

The clothespins of the dharma! Perfect.

Zhoen said...

If she didn't let you touch her, there is nothing you could have done. Be at peace with yourself.

Jean said...

"this capacity above all others: to be able to see our own responses, and not believe in them – not ratify them – and certainly not impute them to the people we work with. Nothing needs to be done with them. They don't need to be accepted or rejected, evaluated or justified. They just need to be given proper ventilation: they'll disintegrate on their own." : Well put. I think we all need this every day in order to try and keep living.

rbarenblat said...

>>All of us who work along the boundaries of intimacy, doing massage or talk therapy, need this capacity above all others: to be able to see our own responses, and not believe in them – not ratify them – and certainly not impute them to the people we work with. Nothing needs to be done with them. They don't need to be accepted or rejected, evaluated or justified. They just need to be given proper ventilation: they'll disintegrate on their own. >>

This. Oh, this. I needed this today. Thank you.

martin said...

Nicely described, both the room and the woman!

Sounds like the woman wanted a hands-off experience. That's her deal. She called you for a massage, not to break some turgid palace she constructed around herself. I suspect it doesn't mean anything about the generations. I guess that thought is one of the pieces of laundry?

But what I really wanted to say was it amazes me someone so eloquent with words can worry about being fat. (I've been reading back a few posts, but it came up again here, "de trop" :) Awesome phrase, I want to start a blog called that now.)

I guess the tummy worry shouldn't surprise me, the poetic are human too. But seriously, dude, we all need to give ourselves a break about this fatness thing. We're all going to die. No matter how thin/hot/healthy a person is previously, they look very bad at that point in their personal development. There's a reason monks used to have those skulls, to remind themselves of that.

Until then what really matters? BMI? waist measurement?

It sounds so absurd when you state these perspectives as positive axioms. e.g. a line from my new self-published novel about crossfit addicts:

"Until then what really measures my self-worth is my BMI," he said stoutly, lifting the 70-pound kettlebell above his head with a focused grunt. "That, and my ability to resist certain Evil Foods."

Meanwhile, across town, in the back of his refrigerator, Evil Foods cackle, plotting their comeback.

I guess I'm getting silly now. But I'd say what matters is how you treat other people, and you already do a good job of that. N.B. it is permitted to treat yourself kindly as well. :)

Hugs, Heloise

Dale said...

:-) You'd be surprised what I can worry about. I don't, you understand, mean to suggest this is a good use of my mental real estate. But there it is, you have to start where you are, as Pema Chodron says.

yes, my person may actually have gotten exactly the massage she wanted and be very happy with it. A lot of writing this, and "hanging out the laundry," was about making room in my mind for that possibility. I don't know & I don't need to know.

Thanks everyone! xo

Nanaimo Massage said...

Love your writing!