Hot Tub Zen

Here I was today, sitting in the hot tub my kids gave me for my birthday last year – looking at my very messy backyard and reflecting on how lazy I am. Here were all these unfinished projects right under my nose. There is the deck to power wash, the picnic table to sand, the gardens to plant. I pulled all my sticks and tools out from under the deck so I can find some suitable tomato stakes and build a few pole bean teepees – and left them there. There is the cedar hedge to finish trimming…

Almost in the same breath I thought how ironic it was to be sitting in this hot tub – the best, most relaxing gift of all time - wearing myself down with my insufficiencies. The birds are singing a riotous Spring symphony, the tulip tree has put forth the most incredible miniature leaves, and besides, it’s raining. Of course, there are lots of tasks awaiting me inside as well – finish sanding, clean the bathroom drain, cook up that pot of beans, and of course there is always work; real work, paid work.

The conflict is exhausting, and no matter which side wins, I lose. I am so uncomfortable with things that are messy and in progress, and I berate myself for being inefficient. It’s as if I have to prove myself to me all the time that I am worthy, that I CAN get shit done. But really – the fact is that life itself is pretty messy, and we are all simply in the middle everything all the time. It’s never finished, the job is never complete, WE are never complete. I thought that surely by the time I got to my age I would be pretty sorted out and zen. But I am absolutely not. I am still in the middle of becoming. I still blurt things out instead of patiently pondering. I get triggered by something my husband says and stop speaking to him for a day. I worry that I said the wrong thing to my kid, and I wish I were a better parent, grandparent, sister, neighbour.

The truth is that I am just another lotus struggling to bloom from out of the mud that binds me to my human messiness, my incompleteness. You are too. I suspect we are meant to progress, and not to be perfect. But it’s so hard to accept the fact that we are not ever going to be perfect. It is so hard to be a process and not a realized lotus, a finished product, to be zen. No matter how far I have come from the chaos I used to be – the path opens before me, and beckons. Get up and get on with it! I have to keep moving. Perfection is static – and my sense is that it is in the movement, the wins, the losses, the noise, and the messiness that we are glorious. If only we could see ourselves clearly…

I’d like to say that I won this one – that I stayed in the hot tub and just enjoyed the in-progress nature of my yard. I compromised. And I got on with it.