Contemplating impermanence, anxiety, and bravado, or: Swimming with loons on Memorial Day

At the end of May I attended a 6-day meditation retreat taught by Yongyey Mingyur Rinpoche. His teachings were on a variety of topics and types of meditation practice, organized into a structured curriculum called the Joy of Living. Although the Joy of Living is a secular path, it is heavily informed by Tibetan Buddhism. One of the teachings was about the concept of impermanence. According to the Rinpoche, or “YMR” as he is sometimes referred to, permanence and impermanence are both just concepts, and therefore neither one is ultimately the Truth; in “ultimate reality,” which is beyond concepts, there is neither permanence nor impermanence. However, Buddhists believe that much suffering is caused by illusion, or wrong beliefs, and that some concepts are more true, i.e. cause less suffering, than others.

Now, I have a long-standing affinity for this kind of “Pragmatist” epistemology, that our belief in an idea should be based at least in part on its usefulness in the world (my PhD dissertation was based on this approach), but that’s another blog post, I think. When it comes to permanence and impermanence, the Buddhist view is that much suffering is caused by our tendency to believe in permanence, and if we can learn to accept impermanence, we will be happier. Rinpoche referred to the “European philosopher” who had a similar view. Among the many lessons of my freshman year of college, Heraclitus’ “Law of Change” has been one of the most lasting.

Heraclitus is often quoted as saying you can’t step into the same river twice (though apparently he didn’t say exactly that; what he did say sounds even more Buddhist, something like ‘We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.’). Sitting by a river to contemplate its ever-changing yet seemingly stable nature has long been one of my favorite pastimes (so much so that I went by the name “River” for a couple of years). I’ve found that understanding the physics concept of a “standing wave” is useful here (see this awesome video of people surfing on a standing wave in the Eisbach River in Munich, Germany. As the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Heraclitus points out, “we call a body of water a river precisely because it consists of changing waters; if the waters should cease to flow it would not be a river, but a lake or a dry streambed.”

What with the Pragmatist and Heraclitean references, plus my recent bout with cancer, the Rinpoche had my attention on this subject of impermanence.

Arguably in the famous Heraclitus quote, it’s not so much the river that’s changing, but we who are not the same when we step into the river a second time. The impermanence of self is a key Buddhist teaching. The meditation YMR taught for this had to do with simply noticing and contemplating the ways that our own bodies and personalities are ever-changing. As I sit with this I of course notice the recent major changes – my double mastectomy, my sudden plunge into menopause, and my dropping 25 pounds as a result of the cancer, mastectomies, and low-fat diet.

The other day I looked in the mirror as I was donning a tight tank-top and capri-length tights in preparation for attending my trapeze class, and mused, “who’d’a thunk I’d end up with a dancer’s body?!” When I was younger I sometimes wished for a “dancer’s body.” Sleek and trim seemed necessary to be successful at certain kinds of activities, and it just wasn’t me, and, I thought, never would be (at least not in this lifetime; so far I haven’t adopted the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, though I am somewhat inclined to believe in parallel versions of “me” in parallel universes, especially after reading physicist Brian Greene’s book The Hidden Reality... but that’s a different blog post too.) Back to wanting a “dancer’s body”: Not being inclined towards anorexia, thankfully, I learned to more or less accept my roundnesses and my mediocre-at-best athletic abilities.

I always liked swimming, and in young adulthood became interested somatic awareness; over the years I have done yoga, tai chi, Feldenkrais, and, at various times, dance. I was always afraid of getting hurt, and had various challenges with pain and repetitive stress injuries, some of which have been partially disabling for brief periods of time. But in 2012-13, some things shifted significantly and I began to become more athletic. It was partly due to my efforts to heal from a Morton’s neuroma that developed in my right foot, that may have been caused by doing too much yoga with weak core muscles; partly due to my somatic leadership training, which included bodywork and physical training. And, it was partly wanting to support my stepdaughter Sarah’s physical fitness, which got me into swimming with the Special Olympics swim team, which in turn got me into Masters’ Swimming. And, then I signed up for personal fitness training (also partly to support Don’s fitness – for his birthday I bought us both gift certificates to The Fit on Monroe).

As a result of all of this, at the time of my breast cancer diagnosis in March of 2015, I was more physically fit than I’d ever been (except, presumably, some brief period of early childhood before I learned to “behave”). I was still afraid of overdoing it and getting hurt, but I’d learned that some of my pain and difficulties actually could be improved or cured by strengthening under-used muscles. As my regular readers will remember, I was bound and determined to do my best to not completely lose this new-found athleticism during my cancer treatment (and at least one of my lake swims took on near-epic story-telling proportions).

In addition to pushing the boundaries of my un-athletic self-concept, swimming long distances, usually by myself, and sometimes in unfamiliar lakes, also involves confronting other fears and anxieties. In response to one of my recent blog posts about the idea of writing more about fear, my friend Judith Zukerman-Kaufman suggested I read our late and mutual friend Judith Strasser’s book Facing Fear: Meditations on Cancer and Politics, Courage and Hope. I am reading it now, and learning a lot, including a helpful distinction between fear and anxiety. Strasser did her homework and points out that scientists are finding significant differences between the physiology of fear, a response to a real and present danger, which causes the familiar adrenaline surge plus related “fight/flight” processes, versus anxiety, the apprehensive anticipation of future danger, which causes more subtle symptoms of tension. (Phobias, apparently, are more like conditioned fear responses than like anxiety).

My family-of-origin includes quite a few people with pretty intense anxieties and/or phobias. The jury is still out on how much of this sort of thing is genetic versus environmental, but either way, there is a strong familial component, and I grew up viewing myself as a calm person compared to my mother and to my older sister. People often tell me I seem calm, which I think is at times an external veneer that is a reaction to the anxiety of others, and an attempt to calm them, without necessarily feeling calm myself.

For instance, the anxiety I manage when doing lake swimming include worries about: lightening strikes; hypothermia; getting tangled in plants and panicking as a result; suddenly seeing or feeling a big fish and panicking in response (the fear itself being the danger I worry about); people’s reactions to my breaking rules; random sudden health crises that would be problematic on land but kill me in the water; what Don’s reaction would be to me disappearing in such a way; getting home late; being too exhausted afterwards to do what I’d planned to do next. I also worry a little about foot cramps, which do actually happen to me sometimes, and are unpleasant, but not actually dangerous, as long as I don’t panic!

There is an aphorism usually attributed (erroneously I now discover), to Mark Twain, “I have experienced many terrible things in my life, most of which never happened.” I was also shaped by my father, who had the role in the family of reassuring us when we were afraid of things that were unlikely to happen (in fact one of his areas of scientific study has been how people think about risk!), and as a result of this (and perhaps lucky genetics) I have a pretty large capacity to talk myself out of most worries before I spiral into them too deeply.

Of course, a lot of my lake-swimming worries are great examples of why anxiety is an evolutionarily important thing. Strasser quotes Richard Restak as saying that at low levels, “anxiety provides a useful constraint on our impulsive, often self-destructive actions” (86). As a less-anxious traveler, I have had to learn to recalibrate when traveling alone, so as not to miss my train or plane, since my sister (or husband’s) more-anxious approach would always get us there in plenty of time! If we want to maximize our time in this impermanent life, paying attention to our apprehension of future danger is useful, up to a point. So I have worked on trying to find the “middle way” between extreme worry and the reactivity to it that would lead me to ignore important cautions.

People also tell me I am brave, and the qualities I have that lead to this assessment may also be a reaction to my mother’s fearfulness. She seemed unwilling or unable to enjoy life fully, because of her fears and anxiety. For instance, she refused to try many new activities because she was afraid she would fail at them. I think many of my urges to try new things and prove I can do things I never thought I could comes from a deep aversion to being limited the way she was. While this may make my activities admirable to some, an honest assessment suggests that my behavior based on this kind of shaping may be just as habitual as a more cautious set of patterns.

As I contemplated the impermanence of this being I call “self” at the retreat last week, I noticed a couple of things. One was while doing a rather extreme yoga posture that I do sometimes, the supine spinal twist (doing it periodically seems to help my neck from getting out of whack, and I was having some problems with my neck during the retreat). This extreme twist, entered gently and held for a long time, gives one ample opportunity to feel many areas of tightness in the body and gradually allow them to loosen. It’s just at the edge, though, where it can cause pain and therefore more tightening. In the middle of practicing this twist, I thought, this self is impermanent, and these habits of tension are like standing waves in a river – they seem like a fixed shape, but are actually made up of an ever-changing flow. As I thought these things, I felt tight places in my hips and shoulders relax much more fully than they had before!

I also began to wonder: Is my plan to do a long swim in Lake Sagatagan, (at Saint John’s University, where the retreat was being held) based on a genuine desire, or just a habit of wanting to prove that I can? True liberation means the freedom to choose, rather than to be in a habitual shape, no matter how much positive reinforcement one gets for being in that shape. Does it serve my liberation to plan my retreat week around such a swim (I had swum in the pool the first day I was there, and had been watching the weather, scoping out the beach, determining the hours it would be open, and probing for how rigid the rules were in the lead-up to the one day that had warm- and dry-enough weather for it), and to push myself to follow through on that plan regardless of how I’m feeling that day?

Well, despite wondering this, on Memorial Day I struck out across the water (making sure to leave before the lifeguards arrived, so as not to have to contend with their rules – a strategy they themselves had suggested to me!). I continued to wonder about this as I swam. It became part of the mind-chatter that I worked to acknowledge and let go of as I returned to the present: Why am I doing this?

Then, I heard the loons. They were calling across the lake from me somewhere. If you haven’t heard loons calling, well, I can only say that in my opinion it is one of the most beautiful, haunting sounds there is. I did breast-stroke with my head above the water as they called, reluctant to put my ears underwater to miss any of it. Eventually I did, assuming if they were calling this much, they would continue to do so. But alas, impermanence! I was not to hear them again while in the lake.

I swam across one lobe of the lake, almost all the way to a beautiful chapel in the woods on the opposite bank. Rather than disturbing the people fishing near it, I stayed a ways out and floated a while, and then turned back. I had only a brief bout of anxiety about hypothermia (the water was cold, but not too cold, I had judged, during a brief dip the previous day). On my way back, feeling tired and a little cold and still wondering why I was doing this, I wondered for a moment where the loons were. I glanced around and realized with a start that they were right behind me! Maybe 20 feet or so.

They looked big at that distance, and I was shocked by their proximity. In my various trips to the Boundary Waters in my early 20s, it never seemed possible to get close to the loons in a canoe. I stopped swimming, grabbed my float, took off my goggles, and ogled them. They dove, and I put my goggles back on to try to see them underwater, half hoping and half scared that I would. I didn’t, and looked up again to see they had surfaced, one of them even closer to me – maybe 15 feet?? Then I did get scared – what if they were crazy, dive-bombing loons? They dove again and I watched underwater again, moving my limbs more this time in order to appear a little more scary to them, but didn’t see them, and when I came up, they had gone so far I couldn’t see them for a long time, and then only barely.

Oh, I thought. This is why I do these swims. So things like this can happen. Bizarrely, I then heard “Taps” playing, another beautiful, mournful sound. I thought I was imagining it, until I remembered a sign I’d seen a few days earlier on an office door about a funeral, and a woman asking me directions to the cemetery on my way down to the beach, and the unusual number of cars parked along a distant bank. And I continued swimming back, practicing appreciating the moment with the loons and being grateful, rather than grasping for more.

And today I am practicing being grateful for the moments when I appreciate this new shape, this “dancer’s body,” which too shall pass.