So I’m in the store with an 88-year young friend I sometimes assist, getting groceries at 4 pm on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. And while she’s looking for free-range organic eggs, I turn around and on the aisle end cap spy a display of salted caramel brownie brittle.
Really? How irresistible! “Hey, Cora,” I say, grabbing a bag. “Check this out. Brownie Brittle!”
“Put it in the cart,” she says, grinning.
Now Cora is roughly the same age my mom would be if she hadn’t died way back in 1993. I’ve missed mom a lot over the years and often regretted I would never be an adult with her and have the opportunity to assist her in her elder years. I’m also very conscious that in a lot of ways Cora fills the gap. And for that I am deeply grateful.
Tossing the Brownie Brittle in the cart, suddenly something happened.
Forty years fell away and I was no longer a 65-year-old 30-pounds overweight adult. I was 15 and skinny and hungry and happy and didn’t have a worry in the world. Life was my oyster. I didn’t have homework and I was going to eat Brownie Brittle on the way home in the car.
Life couldn’t be better.
Forty years of information about sugar and diabetes and gluten allergies and GMOs evaporated. Concerns about carbs and pesticide-laden canola oil didn’t exist. Forty years of envying the emaciated models in the glamor magazines and the last 10 years spent looking in the mirror in disgust at my expanding waistline crumbled to nothing.
Emotionally and kinesthetically I was free. And the liberation was shocking.
WTF? Where the hell had I been? What was wrong with me? What was wrong with the world? How had everything (including me) gotten so freaking heavy? What happened to simple playfulness? To grabbing candy off the shelf and eating it without a thought? To going to I-Hop and ordering pancakes on Sunday morning? To not worrying about climate change and global warming? To not stressing over bills and money and Clinton versus Trump and nuclear armaments and bioterrorism?
Unshackled, I stood between the yogurt and personal hygiene sections marveling, thinking: I want this all the time.
And so yesterday I conjured up the feeling again from memory. And lo and behold, I was free. And I did it again today. This doesn’t mean I reverted back to being an immature devil-may-care 15-year old. It didn’t mean ignoring my knowledge about GMOs and climate change and global warming or the fact that my 2016 election ballet is sitting on my desk, waiting for me to fill it out.
It means that despite these things—in the face of these things—I can still be free. Free to make wiser more informed choices than I could at 15, but with no less exuberance and joie de vivre. Free because I no longer identify with global issues and even my own weight as my problems … but simply as facts I’m aware of and—completely emotionally detached—am free to respond to any way I choose. Wow!
My life pretty much revolves around my new book The E Word and talking about how the ego is a programmed sense of identity, explaining how the ego is an idea about ourselves and not who we really are at all. I talk about switching hats. How if we can get what the ego is (a concept) and get how malleable the concepts of self and the world are (I mean, come on, all you have to do is change your mind ;-), that we then have enormous freedom to be and do whatever and whoever the hell we want to be and do.
And because I know all this I thought I was fairly well unhooked from being under the ego’s spell. HA!
Illusion shattered by Brownie Brittle!! YAY!!!! What’s Next?