But underneath, when something changes--the change being that the friendship passes, they stop making my lipstick, my eye prescription changes, I no longer live in the same city I grew up in--then that feeling of "mine" that filled me up, falls away and I am left standing without it. All of a sudden, I am wobbly, and I feel a pitter patter in my heart. It isn't the pitter patter of love and butterflies, but the feeling of absence. There is space there that was taken up before, by an idea. Even if the idea was incorrect, a delusion, a fantasy--it gave me a sense of a nice structure that I could hang onto.
The "right" answer is to embrace the space. But the right answer is not always human. The human thing is to cling. Cling until you can't. So space is a nice idea, if you are reading a lovely Zen book with beautiful quotes, or seeing a movie. But in reality, it can be hell.
I think this aversion to space is what makes it challenging to age. If you have an idea of yourself, and it sticks at a certain age, you are doing everything you can to hold on to that image, even though time, reality, and everything around you speaks to the change. That is the problem with being set on an idea, a time, an unchanging body or mind. It is going that way anyway, so the structure that you so desperately hang onto, is all the wall collapsing on you. It will collapse no matter what you do. This is life. But trying to resist and hold it up, is what makes a lot of work.
It is all about space and how much of it you can tolerate. How much space can you handle?
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