Yesterday, I was checked out at my local Walgreens by a man who resembled Cousin It. His long, dark curly hair was almost completely covering his face and he also donned a black mask, so it appeared that only one of his eyes was partly visible. I asked the clerk how he was doing and he solidly stated, “I am perfect.”
This made me hesitate. I had never heard the answer, “I am perfect” to “How ya doing?” in my whole life, and I told him that fact. The clerk asked me how I was doing and I answered, “Well, I’m not perfect, but I’m doing pretty well.”
Without a beat, and completely deadpan, he said, “Well, maybe you’ll get there someday.”
Since then, I’ve spent way too much of my time contemplating this two minute interaction. Here I am writing about it on the blog. Was this guy just strange? Was this guy goading me? Was this guy actually perfect? What’s the secret to being perfect? Are we all actually perfect? Was Cousin It supposed to reflect “perfection”?
So, in further insights to my overthinking mind, I read a viral essay by a college student who claims that the “study abroad experience” is horrible and overrated. This student, who was studying in Florence, has the right to her opinion, of course, but I’ve known many people who have studied abroad, including our eldest son, and they all have claimed this experience to easily be in their top ten events of their lives. What was more interesting to me, is that Amanda Knox, the American woman who, in 2007, was falsely imprisoned for murder in Italy, while she was studying abroad, commented on this woman’s essay on Twitter. She said this: “Girl, what are you talking about? Studying abroad is awesome!”
Now, much like the “I’m perfect” statement, I don’t know in what context this statement by Amanda Knox was being made either. Was she being funny, sarcastic and ironic? Has Amanda evolved and healed enough to truly believe that her own experience in Italy was “awesome”? I honestly don’t know. However, it piqued my interest enough to go to Amanda Knox’s Twitter, and to read her introduction. (A quick update on Amanda Knox: She was acquitted for the murder in Italy in 2015, after spending four years in jail. She went to jail in Italy when she was 20. Amanda Knox now lives in Seattle with her husband and her child and she hosts a popular podcast.) In part of Amanda Knox’s introductory tweets, she says this:
” After I was convicted of murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, when the earth dropped out from beneath me, and global shame rained down on top of me, I had my first ever epiphany . . . . My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home. I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer). I wasn’t. I never had been. . . . .The feeling of clarity, though, was in realizing that however small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was *my* life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now . I was alone with my epiphany. I tried to explain it to my mom, but she couldn’t hear me. She thought I was depressed and giving up. She could not, and would not, accept that *this* was my life. She was going to save me, and she just needed me to survive until she did.I told her I would, and it wasn’t a lie. I *would* survive. I knew that, deep in my bones. But I knew that precisely because I had finally accepted that I was living *my* life, whether I was eventually found innocent and freed, or not. I allowed myself to begin to imagine alternate realities. What if I had been home that night, not Meredith, and Rudy Guede had killed me instead? What if I was acquitted and freed in five years? In ten? What if I served my entire sentence, and came home in my late 40s, a barren, bereft woman? What if I killed myself…I imagined all of those futures in vivid detail so that they no longer felt like shadows creeping over me from the realm of unconscious nightmares. And that allowed me to see my actual life for what it was, and to ask myself: How do I make *that* life worth living? That was a big question, one I couldn’t answer in its grandest sense. But there was a smaller version of that question: How can I make my life worth living *today?* I could answer that question, repeatedly. That was entirely in my power. So I did that. Doing sit ups, walking laps, writing a letter, reading a book – these things were enough to make a day worth living. I didn’t know if they were enough to make a life worth living, but I remained open and curious to the possibility. And while my new emotional default setting remained firmly stuck on sad—I woke up sad, spent the entire day sad, and went to sleep sad—it wasn’t a desperate, grasping sadness.It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself and my sanity, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality was. . . .The abyss never leaves. It’s always there. And anyone who’s stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort of carrying it with you.“
Our greatest suffering comes not from what actually happens to us, but our long-term suffering comes from how we think about, and how we react to what happens to us. Whenever I, or anyone I care about is going through a tough time, I repeat the mantra, “One Day at a Time,” all day long if I have to do so, for my own comfort. As Amanda Knox states, if we just concentrate on making our individual days worth living, this will likely add up to a life worth living. If we can work to find meaning and strength in all of the events of our lives, we can springboard from them, instead of wallowing in, and resisting the “unfairness” and the abyss of it all. If we can reach a point of epiphany in our own lives, that no matter what is happening and no matter what we are doing, we can believe that this particular moment, in this particular time, in this particular body, is perfect, then we have peace. And peace is what is perfect, isn’t it? Peace. Perfect. Maybe I’ll get there some day . . .
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
