The Years Don't Happen Without The Days

"The years don't happen without the days." That's what my guided meditation told me this morning. I am on the sixth and final part of the "Headspace Pro" meditation series, a series of six 10-day sessions on silent meditation. Unlike the other guided meditations in the Headspace app, which have cues throughout to tell you what to do, this series begins with several ideas and recommendations pre-meditation, then just times you as you sit in silence, and at the end offers a follow-up for how to maintain a sense of awareness throughout the day.

I've meditated at least a little bit every single day for 345 days... By the end of this month, that will be a full year. The sixth session of Headspace Pro is kind of about the self, and about letting go of the self-- "We think there's a mind observing, an object being observed, and a process of observing. But they are one." (This would be an interesting statement to look at from a phenomenological perspective... *Philosophy major thoughts*)

When Andy (the Headspace guy) said "the years don't happen without the days," he was talking about how it can take months or years to notice a significant change in our daily experience due to meditation and internalizing the ideas he brings up. Not wanting to be discouraging, he explained how the work we put in each day is what builds up to noticeable change.

But in a larger sense, the phrase "the years don't happen without the days" made me think about how easy it is, especially for me*, to get lost in the expanse of past missed opportunities and future unknowns and forget about the small moments that actually make things meaningful, that actually compose reality. It's so easy to not be fully present where I am, or to feel stuck when the future doesn't seem like it's coming fast enough (or when it seems to have come along all too suddenly).

*MBTI Side Note: I kinda love Myers-Briggs types (yes, they are flawed and not perfect but can be a helpful tool for self-reflection), and I'm an INFP, the "N" part meaning that a big part of how I usually see the world is based in theory, ideology, possibilities, and big-picture thinking, which means I can sometimes lose track of details or not give enough weight to what I am actually experiencing/sensing in the current moment. Meditation can be really helpful in balancing out this tendency and helping with anxiety that comes from my brain being somewhere totally separate from whatever is actually happening.

There have definitely been times in Argentina where I feel like nothing is happening nothing is happening nothing is happening and then I look back at my week and somehow, a lot has actually happened. And on weeks when work is slow and I am alone a lot and getting out of the apartment feels like a struggle, I have to remind myself that each moment is passing time. The song "Day by Day" from Godspell ends up stuck in my head a lot...

"Day by day... oh, dear lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day."

My sense of prayer and God is probably a little different from what the song intends, but in essence the "three things I pray" are also guiding principles for my life: to see more clearly the present moment and how everything is constantly changing in small ways, to continue to love deeply and learn how to better express that love, and to follow more nearly what I believe and act authentically.

Okay this is all a lot of philosophizing to say...

This week has been hard.

There has been a lot of travel stress (trying to get to Brazil on Monday and the Fulbright Commission couldn't mail me my passport back in time with the Brazil visa so I am attempting to travel to Buenos Aires by plane without my passport and then grab the passport during my layover), and I only had one real day of classes because everyone was taking exams this week since it's the week before Winter Break, and socially there has been very little middle ground between PEOPLE EVERYWHERE SPEAKING SPANISH and sitting completely alone in my room.

But that's still not really why it's been hard.

My grandmother passed away on Tuesday...

and I don't know I guess when I left in March, my grandfather had been sick for a long time and I knew that I was saying goodbye to him, but I didn't quite realize I would be saying goodbye to my grandmother, at least not this soon, I guess the days slipped me by somehow...

But "the years don't happen without the days" also means that just because years have passed, it doesn't mean the days never happened.

I'm not sure if that makes any sense... what I mean is, when processing loss, it sometimes feels like all of the years of having someone are just gone. It can feel like everything just blends together... like you can see their face but it's some combination of the way their face looked throughout the entire time you knew them, or you can hear them laughing but don't know what they're laughing at.

But then you remember the small moments, each of those days you spent together. The moments when you were really there with them. When she swore while playing Bridge and in your head you were like fuck yeah, that's my grandma-- and the next round, your team kicked butt. When you stood up to receive your Phi Beta Kappa handshake and you walked back to the table to sit next to him and you could see the pride in his eyes and before that moment this award didn't seem to really mean much, but the smile on his face made it matter. When you brought veggie chickpea "tuna" sandwiches out to the dining table at the lake cabin for them to eat for lunch, because, well, that's what you were making, and they actually ate those sandwiches...

The days are what made up the years. The days are real.

When I talked to my mom last night, she described the feeling of the week as "vague." That just felt so accurate... like I'm here in my apartment in Argentina in the middle of an art gallery but there are thoughts of my grandparents fading in and out of the background and suddenly I'm thinking about the movie Departures and the beautiful cello music by Joe Hisaishi is playing in my head and then I miss playing the cello and I miss my cello teacher, who died the summer I left for college... and I'm neither fully in Argentina nor fully in my thoughts, and I'm neither fully feeling nor fully numb.

So I've been living in-between, spending a lot of time home but also doing my best to engage when and where I can.

We had a little party at my class on Wednesday after they finished their quiz. I brought chocolate from San Francisco to share (Ghiradelli squares and dark chocolate almond brittle from that really good place in the Ferry Building).

They thought it was very important to get a picture of me drinking mate

My apartment owner had her first opening since I've been living here, and I liked it. It was very artsy, a multi-media combination of video, photography, word art, sculpture, body art... the kind of thing I feel like a student at my high school would have done (which is praise, by the way-- my high school had some really talented artists).

Mi desnudez sos vos = "My nakedness is you," along with photographs of the artist holding a mirror in the center of her body so that the reflection of that one half of her body creates the illusion of a whole body

I have no idea what this is supposed to be about, but it makes me think of the state of the US at the moment :/

The lighting here made my silhouette look like part of the exhibit...

In that last photo, I'm standing in the doorway, right underneath a glass sign that reads

la piel es un limite

[entonces]

la piel es una posibilidad.

"the skin is a limit

[therefore]

the skin is a possibility." 

I think this was my favorite quote from the show, maybe because the contradiction matched kind of how I've felt (or I just generally love contradictions). Limit => possibility is a line of thinking I appreciate. It makes me think of race and gender and the limits that are placed on us by our skins, our bodies, the parts of ourselves visible as we move throughout the world...  and how this simultaneously holds the possibility of exceeding these limits and reimagining the ways that one's outer appearance defines one's being. The artist tattooed her arm as part of this exhibit, which is a very real, physical manifestation of her statement: literally turning her skin into a canvas for her art. And it also expresses the fact that we are stuck in our skin, that the decay of our body sets the very real limit to our life... at at the same time, all of the possibilities of our lives are held within this skin.

Also interesting that "piel" sounds a lot like "peel."

I wonder if they have some shared origin.

Funny to think of us having peels instead of skins.

See this is how my brain jumps from one thing to another...

Thursday, the day after the gallery opening, I did basically nothing. So on Friday I felt like I had to accomplish something, I had to... do something. And baking is my favorite way of occupying myself and creating something and it's really therapeutic.

But I couldn't decide what to bake. I was craving chocolate, but I knew if I baked a whole pan of brownies I would eat them all and then feel gross. Then I remembered that I had a zucchini in the fridge, and suddenly I really, really wanted chocolate zucchini cake.

I didn't have half the ingredients for chocolate zucchini cake, so I had to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. Unfortunately, sour cream is kind impossible to find, so I ended up making my own: heavy cream with a couple teaspoons of lemon juice, a teaspoon of white vinegar, and a pinch of salt, whipped to the right consistency.

I'm pretty proud of myself for doing that.

I also couldn't find chocolate chips, so instead of cut baking chocolate into chunks and sprinkled it on top.

And I lit the oven on my own for the first time, without burning my hand off! :)

It turned out so freaking good

We usually eat it with vanilla ice cream, but I didn't have vanilla ice cream, so I scooped some of my chilled vanilla chia seed pudding on top, and it looks weird in this photo but it was actually a really good combo.

I didn't realize until I was putting the cake into the oven that chocolate zucchini cake was something my grandma and grandfather both really really loved... and maybe that's a part of the reason that eating it this time tasted so incredibly good. Because it brought me a little closer to them.

So yeah. Life is still happening, day by day, and there's somehow a lot going on at the same time that there's nothing going on, and I'm here in Argentina and practicing staying more aware of what I am experiencing in the present moment, which is sometimes the experience of my mind wandering off to other places.

Tomorrow I am going to (attempt to) fly to Brazil.

But today I am going to finish this blog post and go get a piece of chocolate zucchini cake and maybe listen to some cello music.