EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1:

“THE MYTH OF GOING OUT TO MAKE A LIVING”

One season last year I was sitting in enforced retreat because I had broken my ankle. I had no choice but to bear my own company minute by minute, and to examine much that I’d been trying to run away from.

Each day for six weeks I sat with my back against the headboard of my bed, wiggling my toes gingerly, breathing the hot breath of desperate fear, and trying to calm myself. “ Don’t ,” I begged in panic, “panic. At least the toes work.” Bit by bit, week by week, my spiraling world of worries condensed down from the largest of survival, existential, familial, and spiritual of issues to the simplest of tasks: getting from the refrigerator to the sink on crutches, or on hands and knees; navigating the oceanic space between the kitchen and the bathroom; crawling back up to bed on hands and knees, stair by stair.

Time, my enemy, became my friend by default. All my resources were needed to do the tiniest task. I could not afford the luxury of philosophizing, or collapsing. I was injured and alone. If I deserted myself, there was no one to pick up the pieces. My mind needed to go as slow as my body.

Slowly, sitting up in bed, severely restricted by my cast-bound ankle, my lack of funds, and my lack of family support for the first time after twenty-three years of marriage, I saw my choices as suicidal despair or a leap of faith. And so I took a deep breath and began to pay attention to what was going on inside me.

“Here I am,” I began silently, “alone and deserted, broken and without resources. No money, no clients lined up, no cushion of safety, no health insurance.” And as this true litany was recited, I noticed that my chest froze in terror, my mouth went dry, and my head was clogged with swirling hot air.

“Here I am,” I repeated, “and while it’s true that I am alone and without funds, I do have the ability to notice the weight of my body on the bed.” And as soon as my attention shifted to my weight, I felt the tug of gravity and my body eased a bit. This surprising response, this moment of physical reprieve, even pleasure, became the touchstone I would use again and again. “Here I am, here is my body, here is the weight of my body, here is the pleasure of rocking my body half an inch, here is the pleasure of being present for the slightest movement.” I felt like a balloon that had been given ballast, a kite provided with a tail. I might still be hovering in terror, but at least there was a way to approach the ground, and the faint hope that the darkness that blackened the grasses below my descending balloon might simply be my own unfamiliar shadow.

 # # #

Just before the ankle broke, I’d been pushing myself to get my life together. That meant, of course, going out to find work, to make money.

I had done it thousands of times before. But since my marriage had ended, I didn't have the appetite I used to have, or, it seemed, the resources. When a severe financial crisis surfaced, I could not mobilize my former capacity to “roll up my sleeves and do what needs to be done.” This time, I was hampered by sorrow, by grief and by shame. And I was embarrassed by my further, internal, demand to “catch up” to career women of the ‘90s, next to whom I felt like Rip Van Winkle.

“Go,” I whispered to myself like the ghost of Competence Past, “get dressed up, make calls, solicit work. Ready, set, march, NOW!” But I was in a state of paralytic shock. I could not move. ‘“Just do it!”’ I quoted some popular book. “Feel the fear and do it anyway!”

But there was nothing to be done. No amount of badgering myself got me going. If the only game in town was the hustle-and-bustle game, the helmeted battlefield, I could not play. I hadn’t the heart.

What I needed was to spend days weeping. Walking with slow, tentative bare feet. Feeling the weight of the air, the warmth of the sun. Nothing that could possibly bring in money. . . .