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I went to the opera last week.
I have no idea what happened, but this blonde woman sang to this short, pudgy, Hispanic guy. She held onto him, and sang something to the effect of “Blah latavia latitzia de of blah blah blah”, but for just a moment of trying to figure out why she was supposed to love this guy, who had no chemistry with her whatsoever, I heard the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. One note. One note rang through the speakers and through the air above all else and ripped my soul apart. Just as I had stood up for a coffee break and to listen to some silence, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this one note that I had heard over and over before. That night, that note was the meaning of life.
Yesterday, after passing by 800 spots of dried gum on the sidewalks, 4 people asking for handouts, 3 democratic street workers asking me if I had time for the Democratic Party, and about twenty full cabs just when I was needing one, I hurried past the grocery store, and the sound of a really good jazz trio played for tips just outside the door. The trio consisted of one horn player, wearing old tattered clothes, one keyboard player, who looked like he was doing completely fine in life, and one seemingly homeless man playing the drums on several upside down buckets, and But the sound was worthy of a $35 ticket and a two-drink minimum.
It’s dark. Cold. Raining today. The summer of wine and roses has given away to the land of jackets, umbrellas, and gray days. But inside the cafe, the smell of freshly ground beans is flowing through the air system, so the room is filled with a rich but subtlety sweet aroma, thick enough warm your heart, but light enough to let you just sit and enjoy.
We are a culture of “finding perfection.” I’m completely guilty of it. Whether it’s a recipe, a restaurant, a bar, a performance, a tv show. I go to the Metropolitan Opera and criticize the three hundred year old story about a man selling his prized coat to save a dying woman, instead of listening to the beauty Puccini composed, and completely ignoring that I’m sitting inside one of the most famed buildings in the world. I am the most critical of critics I know, and when people ask me why, I’m honest. I’m a perfectionist. I want it to sound good, and have a good message. I want the music to be beautiful, and for the dialogue to cut to the point and stop Stephen King’ing it’s way through. What I find though, is that being a perfectionist works rather well, until you come up against a perfection that’s not your own.
True, we’re all perfectionists of some sort. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all the same perfectionists. Wikipedia defines perfectionism as the believe that perfection can be attained. Easy enough, until you start to define perfection. To me, perfection might be Bermuda, but speak to the homeless man holding your door open and his hand out, and he might say that perfection is a trash bag without holes, or a sandwich. To me, perfection might be the perfect sound. But to someone else, perfection of the same sentence might be the perfect message. The ultimate defeat comes when you realize that the same object of perfection can’t and won’t live up to everyone’s expectations. (Just to hammer in the point, Wikipedia also goes on to link perfectionism with narcissism and OCD.)
Everyday, every minute, every second, someone learns that nothing is perfect. And the world is full of things to criticize. And it becomes a pretty depressing place. Lonely. And pitiful. But when you take out the quest for perfection, the world turns into a place of experiences. And just maybe, just maybe, as you begin to live through them and love them for what they are, then every once in a while throughout all the mess, you’ll find something meaningful. Something amazing. Something exquisite.
Something beautiful.
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There’s a good chance I’m going to die of a heart attack.
I don’t mean this as a threat, as just because of the happenings with my dad in the last couple of days. But because I have a history of being “The Great… Everything.” As the cliché goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.” I resent that. But still, just today I have redesigned a website, written a short story, checked up on my family, tried to be a good pet owner, a good housekeeper, a good writer, and a successful job hunter. And still, my feeling is that I haven’t done enough. Just yesterday, I spent an entire day working online, writing, and checking up on my family in the middle of a crisis, and even went to the gym, and yet, I’d say that I could have done more. No matter if I was up at 7 and went to bed at 1:30 in the morning, I absolutely, positively could have done more. And there’s a chance that I could do the same today. And tomorrow.
Why?
New York City is a culture based on being succesful. Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book, “Eat, Pray, Love,” speaks of each city’s “word”- a one word description of the major cities of the world. Rome=”sex”, the Vatican=”power”, and New York: “Achieve”. While Gilbert gives NYC its word, it’s almost impossible to say that she has it wrong. Since the 1970s, the city seems to have been built off of Frank Sinatra’s remnants, “If I can make it there/ I can make it anywhere.” Broadway is “the best” of the world’s theater (and even that’s not enough; now there’s the “Best of Broadway”), Wall Street is the place for “serious finance”, which is great, until, as we’ve seen recently, there’s a serious crash.
The tourists that come here ask us constantly, “How do you do it all? How do you see it all?”, and there’s one simple answer. You can’t. There’s ten million people in the Five Boroughs. That’s ten million waiters, brokers, writers, filmmakers, actors, mothers, fathers, every type of “ers”, all trying to live up to Sinatra’s mantra. All trying to succeed, the majority of them trying to do “it all”. But the majority of them are only here for a short time. I may be getting off track here a little, but many New Yorkers, myself included, in “striving to make it here”, burn out. They try to make the most of the city, but in doing so, they leave out some of the best parts. In trying to succeed, they lose track of what they came here for in the first place, and forget to relax. They leave New York, promising that “next time around”, they’ll “do it better.” As if they didn’t live up to the city’s standards. And even less, their own.
This is not supposed to be about New York, but it is about our culture. Depression affects nearly 19 million Americans, and any therapist will tell you, a very important step in treating depression is trying to get the patient to realize that right now, they are at this place, and at this time, and they have to deal with this situation. In other words, deal with one thing at a time. If the focal point of treating depression (while I’m fully aware that there are hundreds of other treatments) is to do one thing at a time, what makes dealing with our own lives any different?
Imagine you’re going to the grocery store. You walk in, and there are no aisles. There’s no organization. The breads are next to the cereals, the milk is next to the bread, the dog food is next to the lettuce. I don’t know about you, but I’d stop dead from being overwhelmed. But you put in aisles, and you can spend hours going up and down, looking at all the fantastic new products and food that can get you one step closer to your dreams, or at least, a full stomach. Those who went to a liberal arts school (myself included) also realize now that while it took you years to find the right career path, those who focused on a single field are already working, and probably doing fairly well for themselves. (Doh!)
I can’t think further ahead than one day at a time, and yet I find myself having panic attacks over and over again because of the vast thought that by the end of my lifetime, I have certain things I have to get done. While it’s great to have a plan, one shouldn’t find themselves curled up on the floor because they can’t get it all done today. It’s important to remember while we’re trying to “achieve” that achievement itself comes in small doses. You get the chance to compete before you get the medal. And before we find ourselves completely burnt out, we have to remember to take just a moment to think about what’s going on now, what we have to get done, and how it effects our overall desires. And once we’ve done this, we’ll find that our minds have a single accomplishable goal to focus on. In achieving this small win today, later we get to relax, because we know that we’ve done one small thing to take us to our goal tomorrow.
Time passes. Life goes on around us. And when you just sit and be, you don’t notice it. Things move, without any sense of a plan or meaning. But when you really look at it, even time, the most general fact in our universe, has a focus. Every decade, every year, every day, every hour, every minute, every second, there is a focus. But even time knows that in order to acheive, it must deal with one moment, well, at a time. After all, it can’t do everything.
