Choosing Your Lane

I just finished listening to Brick Lane. I bought Monica Ali's book on tape for a road trip that never materialized, and have since been listening piecemeal each time I go on an errand that takes more than 5 minutes. Little Bitty has been enthralled—“Mommy, can we hear the story?”—probably more fascinated by the lyrical cadence of the narrator’s Euro/Bangladeshi accent(s) than the story itself. (It's not a children's book by any means.)

It’s a story of a woman, Nazneen, whose arranged marriage took her from Bangladesh to London with a highly mis-educated, vapid, but kind husband—and the cultural evolution that happens for her and her family in the years just before and after 9/11. There’s a bit of romance and a bit of politics. But the theme is mainly this: Does one wait and allow one’s life to be arranged by fate—by God? Or must you take your life into your own hands?

For Westerners it seems like a no-brainer. We’re all about self-determination, venturing forth, blazing trails. But the book illustrates how difficult a choice it would be if you’d been raised from the womb in a culture where, as a woman, as a Muslim, you understood that virtue lay in allowing your fate to be decided for you. Trying to be a good wife, Nazneen relies on prayer, housework, family caretaking, and mental submission to her husband’s winding academic monologues to suppress any thoughts that might veer into the realm of decision-making.

Most of us would recoil at the thought. (How Third World!) So we do the same thing without thinking.

Don’t we? I do. There are times when, rather than put my mind to the task of accomplishing a major goal, I delay. Let me just wash these dishes; it’s only a few. It won’t take but a minute to make the bed. I can tackle my stuff after I return this phone call. After I create another blog post.

I put my mind to the things I know I can accomplish easily—things I can see. (Look at the china sparkle!) It’s easier and yields a quicker payoff than getting to the difficult business of taking action and making decisions that will have a bigger influence on my fate.

I think for those of us with any kind of religious background, there is, ingrained, the idea that the Higher Power knows what is best for us and will nudge us in that direction, keeping our destination a secret from us until the very last minute—then leaving us to deal with it as best our faith will allow.

But, whether we’re religious or not, the idea of making a decision—and possibly making a mistake—is harder than relying on something or someone else to decide for us: a husband’s subtle preference, a child’s pressing need, a friend’s admonition, the cards in the Tarot deck, a sign in the stars.

To take our lives into our own hands makes us…well, responsible for our lives. And perhaps, deep down, we know what a grave and precious responsibility that is. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because we know how important our lives are—how vital our purpose on the planet—that we suppress, procrastinate, equivocate and delay. We think that our own lives are too important for us to touch. But that can’t be true, can it?

And at some point, for many of us—if we’re listening; if we are present in our bodies at all—the call to lay our hands on our our own lives gets to be too great. You feel yourself pushed away from a situation that doesn’t suit. Or pulled to pursue a calling that gets louder and louder. At some point you realize that you are not fighting against a Higher Power, but responding to Its demands. And when that becomes clear, what is there to do but reach out to your own life and take it in your hands? What can you do but become your own Fate?

That is Nazneen's story. Check it out for inspiration.

First, Do Nothing.

I thought about going to yoga class.
I considered going to church.
Said Husband was outside sanding and painting the boards for much-needed book cases. I thought about helping him. Or taking the sander the old bureau that needs to be redone.
I need to write a letter to my friend who is ill, and send a thank you card to the woman who took me to lunch last week. I thought about doing those things. Or working on the text for my website.
I turned on the classic movie channel, thinking I might catch an old flick. Gene Kelly didn’t move me. Neither did I Love Lucy. Neither did Rachel Ray.
I acquired Obama’s biography. Considered reading that.

What I did instead was to lie down on the narrow couch in my room, pull a cotton spread up to my shoulders and allow myself to lie there until I fell asleep. I slept for a couple of hours until my child came in from play, squealing and chattering, and my husband finished his task, thumping things back into the closets. I got up long enough to quiet them. And then…I lay down again. I went back to sleep.

Okay, that was extreme. Oh, but I needed it! And there is something to be said for moments of silence, of quiet, of rest.

My days often begin at 7 a.m., and frequently end at one or two the next morning. I am famous among my friends for catching a few winks in the afternoon. (Still clinging to the idea that when baby sleeps, mommy should sleep—though “baby” is now four and hardly willing to nap herself.) But those naps are strategic. I figure that if I allow myself to sleep a while during the day, I’ll be able to stay up later in the evening to “get things done.”

The focus is always on getting things done. How many tasks can I accomplish in a day? How many tasks can I accomplish at one time? And I’m not the most "accomplished" among the folks I know. Many of my women friends work nearly constantly. Two jobs, some of them. A job and kids. Kids and elderly parents. A job and an all-consuming pastime. We turn our hobbies, our exercise regimens, even our social activities into tasks by which we evaluate our level of accomplishment.

For many of us, the very idea of stopping. For a minute. To rest. To catch our breath. To think. That is—well—unthinkable.

I wonder why? I think some of it comes from living in society that tells us we have to do more and more—and gives us the technology to be doing something constantly. But I think that, for some of us (okay, for me), there is a deeper need to prove ourselves. To prove that we can do everything and be everything. To fend off any criticism for our imperfections by being able to say, “But look at how hard I’m working….” To convince ourselves that we are good enough.

Doing—and being able to exhibit the fruit of our doing-ness—gives us a sense of power and control. But we forget that our source of power does not come from what we do. It comes from who we are. Before we do anything, we are powerful. Who wields more power than a newborn infant who can’t even raise her head? Who wields more power than the patient lying in a coma? All our energy, our thoughts, our decisions, our time, our attention is drawn to this one who can “do” nothing. That should tell us something.

Periodically, I will myself to do nothing. To let the e-mail pile up; to let the phone ring. To stop thinking, thinking, thinking about the next task I “need” to do. Once in a while I give myself permission to let things—and people—wait. I recall the phrase, “Cease striving and know.” And I do nothing.

It feels powerful.

What makes you smile?

“I just want to come home and see you smiling.” So says sweet, sincere Said Husband.

To which I respond with a smirk and a snarl. Further proof that there is, indeed, a deep problem. Because when a guy says he wants his wife to be happy, it wouldn’t make her mad if she wasn’t so unhappy to begin with.

I hear a lot of women say they’re sent off the rails by the slightest thing Dude does. Why would you put on that ugly green shirt? Why do you stir the chili counterclockwise? Don’t you know that the toilet paper should roll outward, not back? What are you, some kind of idiot?

I’ve started to realize—through lots of counseling, lots of self-help books, lots of quizzing other women, and the hard, long slog of gaining tiny bits of wisdom through experience—that when we’re just constantly angry about the things he (or anyone) does, we’re really mad about something going on within us.

The idea is to get past his counterclockwise soup stirring long enough to figure out what our own issue is. Because here’s the thing: Even if he's doing something that’s actually stupid, the fact that we’re also mad at ourselves just compounds the problem and distracts us from doing a real, objective analysis and, ultimately, finding a solution. His stuff is just a distraction from what is really trying to get our attention.

So, woman, why aren’t you smiling? What would make you grin?