Old New Year's Eves and Days

Notes from Old Journals. (With Status Updates.)

December 31, 1985: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Home for the holidays from university. My dad has given his sister a fat, smiling “Buddha of Happiness” statue and I rub the round belly for luck. (Later, in Bhutan, I will see hundreds of depictions of dozens of Buddhas, but never this one; I will learn this is not the Buddha at all, and the Buddhist way to happiness has nothing to do with luck, but with karma.)

January 1, 1991: Sudbury, Ontario

Home for the holidays after two years of teaching in Bhutan. I am miserable, disoriented, homesick for the mountains. “Time is moving so slowly, at times I feel stuck in one hour forever. If I were home for good, how long would this take? To pass, I mean.” (See Answer, January 1999.)

January 1, 1994: Gomtu, Bhutan 

Visiting my in-laws with my husband, Tshewang, and our son, Pema. “Pema wakes in the morning and escapes the mosquito net. There are the usual necessities – diapers, juice.” (I do not write about the other necessity: a feeling of belonging in this country that I love, that I have married into. I do not know it is necessary. I don’t even know it is missing.)

December 31, 1995: Thimphu, Bhutan 

We have just moved from a tiny, cramped, two-bedroom Bhutanese-style cottage into a spacious three-bedroom Western-style bungalow. I love the house and feel at home. Tshewang does not love the house, he does not feel at home. Our marriage is unravelling and I don't know how to knit it back up. Instead I write. My friend Susan has been pestering me to submit something to some CBC contest I've never heard of, so I begin an essay (that will win a $10,000 award and become a book).

December 31, 1997: Thimphu, Bhutan

Champagne and Auld Lang Syne with friends. Tshewang and I have split up. I have decided to leave Bhutan. I wake up on January 1 and write, “I don’t want to go.” Why am I leaving? Whenever anyone asks, I always have a good five or six reasons on hand, but none of them really answers the question.

January 1, 1999: Lanark, Ontario

With Pema and my best friend, Susan. I have been in Canada for six months. I have left Bhutan, I have left Tshewang, my life story does not make sense to me. I think I am going to feel this grief forever. Susan assures me I will not. I am afraid that I have burned through all my allotted luck and happiness. Susan assures me I have not. But how long will this take to pass? (Answer: a long, long time.)

December 31, 1999: Toronto, Ontario

With Pema and Tshewang, down by Lake Ontario, star-struck equally by fireworks and by the thousands and thousands of people gathered peacefully to watch the skies and celebrate the biggest New Year’s Eve in a thousand years. No planes fall out of the sky; the grid stays up. The only sign of disorder we see is a couple of teenagers throwing a newspaper into the street. A police officer tells them to pick it up. They do. Our eyes go back to the chandeliers in the sky. Tshewang says, “I feel proud to be a human being.”

December 31, 2002: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Visiting family. I make a list of accomplishments for the year: went to teacher’s college, got a Canada Council grant for a novel about a broken-up family, got shortlisted for a CBC Canadian Literary Award (what?? I don’t even remember what story I sent in), filed three years of late income tax returns. I have been in therapy for two years. I am lucky. I am starting to feel happy.

January 1, 2004: Toronto

Listen to Billie Holliday, eat leftover shrimp risotto, wish for a full-time teaching job. (Note: Wish comes true later that year. Luck? Karma? The fruits of therapy? All of the above? It is a job that gives me great happiness.) 

December 31, 2008: Toronto

I finish my first novel about a broken-up family, two hours before midnight. I mean, "finish." (It's never finished. Even after it is published, to my great delight, in 2011.)

January 1, 2012: Toronto

I go to the gym and am tricked by the sight of the sun into walking home with wet hair. While my scalp thaws, I leaf through old journals and think about luck and karma and happiness. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a great majority of the European words for 'happy' at first meant 'lucky.' An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant 'wise'." In Buddhism, there are several words for happiness, but that is a topic for another day. According to the Bhutanese, whatever you do on the first day of the new year sets the pattern for the rest of the year, so I have to work on my second novel.

Why I Love Teaching. One of the Reasons.

Difficult, beautiful, thoughtful questions and observations about Buddhism from my mythology students. "Is the desire for enlightenment a desire of the body or the mind?" (This in response to my claim that consciousness is a product of the body.) "Isn't the desire for enlightenment also a desire?" (Luckily I have an answer to that.) And an answer to my question about why the body should be made to suffer in order for the mind to find enlightenment: "We make the body suffer so that the soul will remember, because as soon as physical suffering is over, the body forgets."

As Tobias Wolff wrote in This Boy's Life, teaching makes you accountable for your thoughts.

 

Five Times a Day

In her beautiful memoir, Married to Bhutan, which I read yesterday in virtually one sitting, Linda Leaming mentions a Buddhist practice in which a person thinks about death five times a day. This made me wonder: Why five? Is that a lot? What kind of day do you have if you wake up and tell yourself, Today I’m going to think about death five times?

I decide to try it.

Thought # 1 (leaving for the gym): What if this is the last time I leave the house? People will say, “She was just on her way to the gym. She never even saw it coming.” (Ha! Little would they know....)

Thought # 2 (in spin class, pedalling as hard as I can): The instructor tells us to pedal harder, and in my mind, I pound the bike and say, “I’m dyin’ here.”  Does that count?

Thought # 3 (walking home from the grocery store in the rain, noticing tightly furled buds): I wish I could slow spring down.  “A peach blossom is beautiful...because it is temporary,” says the monk at the end of the Bhutanese film Travellers and Magicians. Yes, yes, I know! But if only it could be temporary a little longer.

Thought # 4 (staring at an empty Word document): Death is the blank page on which life writes.

Thought #5 (remembering Rome): It's so weird that my very Catholic mother doesn't believe in an afterlife.  We were standing in front of an Inferno-esque fresco when she mentioned, oh so casually, that she did not believe in heaven or hell. I was shocked. Can you be a Catholic and not believe in life after death? Isn’t the afterlife kind of the whole point? Also, if she didn’t believe in an afterlife, why was she dragging me into every church in the city? I asked what she thought awaited us after death. She said, “Nothing. I believe we live on through our genes, in our children.” I said, “Then can we go back to that restaurant near the place we bought the leather sandals?”

Thought # 6 (leaving to do a reading in Hamilton): What if this is the last time I leave the house?  OK, when you start to repeat yourself, it’s time to stop. Plus, I’ve done the required five.

Thought #7 (driving past a cemetery. A very big cemetery): “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Enough with the death thoughts already!

Thought #8 (on the way home from the reading): I talk with author Cynthia Holz about Buddhism, end of life care, the end of a life, the moment of death. Rain falls in the streets of the dark city. I am so absorbed in my life at the moment, I forget I am supposed to be thinking about death, even though we have been talking about it the whole way home.