HOWL

Last summer, on one of my Bella rides, I howled. This was unexpected. We were flying up Rte. 143, running at the edge of 130 km/h (about the limit of what my sweet, little 650cc beaut can do) when all of a sudden, an “Owww, owww, hooooowwwwwlllll!” escaped from behind my helmet. I gasped, smiled, eyes crinkling, not knowing where or how that howl came to be.

This happened a few more times over the remaining months riding. And now, this summer, the yelp has reappeared. The variations are so interesting.

It is all so very interesting. Who is this woman? What wild joy is she unable to contain that it escpaes in the form of animalistc manners? How was this not a part of her childhood and only now is it excavated like King Tut’s tomb? I was not a howler, not even in my most intimate moments, and now to find I do it on a regular basis while on the back of a steel horse named Bella, it so makes me laugh out loud.

How wonderful and strange to be surprised by the things I do! I’ll be forty-eight next month and to be able to meet that birthday with curiousity and joy feels remarkable. I know who I am at my core: my penchant for kindness; capacity for easy love; severe dislike of cooked mushrooms; self-reliance to a fault; the need to always be moving, in any direction, or dancing like a feral cat; fearful of truly being seen and still loved; find contentedness with Trixie’s breath on my toes as I meditate; and the irresistible pull of an early morning and pen and paper. These things are me—they are as permanent as the ink covering my arms. But to find out new things about myself, to be open to and excited about to these new things, to meet them with genuine wonder and marvel (as opposed to a fear response, which I tended to resort to previously) is truly the most sweetest experience.

In a very real sense, I don’t know who this woman is staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. Sometimes, I am bowled over by the shift internally. Previously, I spent a lot of time policing myself in how I showed up to the world. Was I presenting professionally enough? Always too rough around the edges. Was I smart enough? As if. Do I belong here? Certainly not. When that running monologue is a constant din in the background of every human interaction, something is lost.¹ Now, that policing has turned into something else: this genuine curiosity.

In meditation, metacognition and meta-awareness are two concepts that once I physically felt was an unlock for me². Metacognition is thinking about thinking and meta-awareness is awareness about awareness. Using both of thse allows me to disconnect from the self-identification of thought and inspect those same thoughts without falling for the story that the small mind is telling me. The small mind is necessary; it’s what pays the bills and strives at work and raises kids. But that small mind is just that: small. It gets wrapped up and flustered. It’s countered with Big Mind, which allows that watching of thoughts and letting them go. Big Mind recognizes the you in me and me in you. It allows the process of introspection to occur without losing myself in what those thoughts mean.

All this (she says, gesturing widely with her arms) because of the events from three and a half years ago. To think about the trajectory I would have continued on if I didn’t start the hard process of self-reflection is a little mind-numbing. My own insecurities created so many issues in my interpersonal relationships that I want to write everyone letters on purple floral paper in a fine hand with apology after apology, taking responsibility for the indelicate manner in which I moved through our relationships. But the past is just that, past. We only use it as ways to tell the story of how we came to be, and to meet each moment with a bit of grace because this moment—THIS moment, right now—is gone already.

Sitting on the cushion—fifteen minutes here, ten there—is what has given me the ability to see the stories for what they are and query why it is I interpret things through a certain lens. And then to let it go, to gloriously let it go. This metacognition and meta-awareness means I am not beholden to any one thing. An event, a trait, a tic, or one unexpected howl does not define me. So I will continue to howl. I will continue to find where sparks of joy lie, where small comforts arise, where the people who light me up live and inhabit. And it will be such a delightful joy meeting each moment. It already has been. With pain comes growth, and with growth, who knows?

Who is this woman?!

Footnotes

1. It is not lost on me that this is how many other people feel. Another one of the joys of doing all this work is the acceptance and celebration of just how average I am. There is such relief in that. ↩

2. I have discovered that I truly don’t understand something until it sits well in my body. I don’t how to explain it. It’s as if when I learn something, it bounces around in my brain for a bit. At this point, the something I just learned feels hollow, thin, impermanent. At some point, it starts to migrate to my body, finding an empty space in my innards, at which point it nestles in, tucks itself into my flesh, and now I know it. Weird, right? ↩