My Manifesto (at the moment)

The people whose manifestos get attention have typically just shot up a school, so I thought, for a change of pace in modern times, wouldn’t it be nice if a stable person (if I may be so bold to flatter myself thusly) were to write one. 

I have many firmly held (albeit transitory) beliefs and I have never set them out in one text before. On the off chance that I’m right about things, or that some of my readers are searching out what to believe in this, or any, time: Why not commit my credo to text? You can parse it and see if anything strikes you as useful, or as bollocks, and proceed accordingly. 

I am wrapping up my turn as a 38 year old and so, before I age any further and come to entirely new and contradictory discoveries, I shall endeavor to set down my thoughts.

My actions don’t always reflect these beliefs, but nonetheless, these are the principles I come to as my current truth when I quietly reflect on what I know: 

Friendship 

Accept the failings of your favorite people. Seek out an overall energy in a person that draws you upward. 

Don’t hoard people. There are so many valid reasons to let people go and lose touch. 

Marriage 

This person needs to give you stamina to stay connected to the world and not flee into fixed habits and ruts. 

Your job is to be constant and patient and take excellent care of yourself if you hope to be strong for the other. 

Dating 

If you’re in it for results, it’s a job. You can take sabbaticals, but if you want a true mate, it’s a deeply time-consuming, emotionally laborious endeavor to find this person. Move with a spirit of playful strategy. Quit for awhile. Return. 

Family 

The nuclear family is everything. Unless yours is toxic in which case you owe them little. If you got a good family you must do everything so they feel celebrated. Without children this energy can go entirely to your parents until they die. I like to spoil my parents with time and presence in lieu of money. If I made more money, I’d spoil them with that. 

Aging 

It’s very important to understand that a fear of age is a fear of change and of death. Even the smallest signs of aging must be met with the deepest self-compassion and understanding that it’s death and irrelevance we are actually fearing. 

Compassion 

Everyone is doing their best. You may, though, determine that a person’s best isn’t good enough. But start from the assumption that they are doing their best with the tools they have. 

Beauty and sex appeal 

I try to ask myself what I find beautiful because I was *told to* and what’s beautiful to my more feral self. It’s not so possible to separate, but it’s a worthy thought experiment to refresh every day and in everyone you look at, starting with the mirror. 

Confidence 

It’s everything. At least it is in the world I’ve come up in. It’s a huge deficit to lack it and to do without it creates a drag on all you try to do, like walking into a strong wind. We pursue all of the symptoms of confidence, trying to achieve it from the outside without building up the core of our inner belief and trust in ourselves. 

Mental health 

There are haves and have nots in this arena and some people are climbing an extraordinary uphill battle to function in daily life. As soon as I walk out into Brooklyn, I can feel the depth of sadness, fear, and anxiety in the ether. This is important to keep in mind when we cannot understand why people behave so irrationally. So many people are unwell. My current state of wellness is a privilege, so valuable that you cannot put a price tag on it. It’s a form of wealth and power to wield with awareness. Like all health, mental wellness can be lost. Like wealth, it must be managed and protected. 

Climate change 

I think it’s ok to plan for a long life while also truly accepting the possibility that we are going to be nuked or burn soon. I try to toggle between these possibilities in my planning. 

Travel 

Nature clarifies everything. An hour in nature (or ideally 3, 4, 24) reframes whatever question I’m ruminating on. Nature releases my obsessive vice grip and redirects me to see new solutions and ideas. 

Productivity 

The desire to be useful to our society is an innocent and childlike aspiration. It’s very pure. It’s easily corrupted. Protect your time as much as you can by shining awareness on it. What you accumulate with your hours shapes your body and your brain. 

Status 

It’s very real and very damning. Until you step outside it and it immediately evaporates. I live between these spaces, assessing my standing and believing stories about my worth and then jumping outside the matrix entirely and seeing myself as a collection of star particles. Neither space is particularly useful. Equality is hard to feel into. I find it easier to place myself above and below people — riding the waves of my ego in any given interaction. To see yourself as a true equal in an interaction means to endure the discomfort of really standing present with another person, in your full strength and your full fragility. 

Time 

Whatever you’re doing, do it with your full presence. Unless you’re at the dentist, then obviously, dissociate. But in general, if a task is tolerable, do all you can to be fully with whatever you’re doing. That doesn’t mean don’t multitask, but within the multitask, be fully there(s) and aware that that’s what you’re doing. 

Suffering of others 

I think I understand my role in the massive suffering of the world??? It’s to take care of people in my interactions with them. To gift people actual presence when I see them, not the paltry version that passes for it, with one eye on your phone and a foot out the door. This is such a small contribution, but it will add up. Be present when you’re here, and, there. I like the activist idea of thinking globally and acting locally. Local to me means engaging with what’s right in front of me. And it means making peace with my personal choice and limitations at this moment, to do little or nothing about most of the suffering out there in the vast world, focusing in on support for my immediate community. 

Anticipatory grief 

When life is good it’s natural to wait for the other shoe to drop (an expression born from old NYC tenement life — listening unwittingly as your upstairs neighbor takes off his shoe and… eventually… his other shoe) — I calm myself for bad things to come with a beautiful image passed down to me from my friend’s therapist, who said to imagine climbing a mountain while carrying a pillow. You climb, then set the pillow and rest. Then climb, then rest. You’re climbing, but you have a pillow.

I fear the bad things and the loss I know is coming. But I imagine the pillow and the multitude of other soft, strong tools.