Staying in the center

Lessons from Alan Watts and a fossilized banana I found in my car

The only thing you need to know in order to accurately take the temperature of my life at present, is that I just found this fossilized banana under the driver’s seat of my Jeep.

As a general rule, I don’t trust drivers with spotless Jeeps. What are you using that thing for? Surely not the off-roading, outdoor life for which it was destined. But admittedly, I tend to take the rough and ready aspect of Jeep driving a bit too far, only washing mine about twice per year, routinely finding treasures under the seats when I do. I once asked my son, Isaac, not to leave his garbage on the passenger side by saying, “My car is not your trash can.” To which he replied, “I know; it’s yours.”

Touché.

Alas, the banana incident is over the line, even for me. This particular banana has been missing for over 2 months, and I know this because I remember the exact moment I lost it. I was driving Isaac to the Sacramento airport after a family weekend in Tahoe at the end of February, and because I planned to attend a yoga class on the way home, I grabbed a banana and protein bar as a snack. Except, once in the car, I couldn’t find either one. I searched everywhere, asked Isaac if he’d seen my snack, and then proceeded to gaslight myself: perhaps I did not, in fact, bring it with me. Maybe I’d left it on the roof of the car and then drove away. Maybe I never grabbed it in the first place. Maybe bananas don’t even exist and it was all just a dream.

For the first few days, the conundrum frustrated me. Where had the banana gone? Would I ever have the answer? Was I losing my mind? Like all things, time devoured my fixation on the issue, little by little, until I eventually forgot about it altogether.

Until today.

Having recently returned from a road trip to LA, my trash can vehicle was in an exceptional state of disarray. It was finally time for its twice yearly cleanse, wherein every nook and cranny would be purged of sunflower seeds, gas station receipts, and sand imported from the beaches of Southern California. As I rummaged beneath the floor mats I spotted what appeared to be the aging neck of a banana and, because I am wont to eat one in the car pre or post yoga, assumed I had dropped part of the peel at some point over the past week. The utter disbelief of discovering it was, in fact, the lost banana of yore, was astounding.

There it was, alongside the protein bar, tucked between the metal floor and the black carpet, hardened and black, a testament to how fundamentally scattered my life has been since I moved up North last summer. It’s true that my nervous system has undergone significant recovery since coming here—that I am at peace in the forest, serenaded by the song of birds, canopied by a copse of trees—but it’s just as true that I have yet to put down roots, that I am splintered in more ways than one, that the banana isn’t the only thing I’ve lost.

Half of my belongings are in a storage unit and the other half are here, inanimate visitors in someone else’s home. Anything I’ve stored in the garage has been moved no fewer than ten times by my uncle since I moved in, and my closets and drawers depict scenes of chaos. I’ve lost things on every trip I’ve taken over the past nine months, including my electric toothbrush, my favorite hoodie, and a priceless, irreplaceable memento of my past. On this last trip to LA I left my Aeropress coffee maker, my prized Modelo hat, and at least six other things at my sister’s house. Even my day to day routine has been molded around that of my elderly roommate’s, a perpetual molding of myself around a life that has been established here for decades.

I feel displaced, not just because this is the first time I’ve lived under someone else’s roof since I was eighteen years old, but because Isaac isn’t here, and thusly half of my heart is missing as well. Adjusting to the second half of life, in the absence of my baby, without the comfort of my own home, has proved challenging.

What I have always craved, as an artist and small business owner, is structure, and structure is what continues to elude me. Every morning I wake up and think: today is the day I finally get my shit together. And every evening I am forced to make peace with the fact that it wasn’t. I’ve struggled throughout this transition to find my footing, to develop a routine with some semblance of consistency, to develop habits I’ve long sought after, to keep promises I’ve made to myself along the way. And in so doing, I am reminded, as I often am, of sage words from Alan Watts:

“Stay in the center and you will be ready to move in any direction.”

Perhaps it isn’t structure that’s required at this moment in time, but centeredness. Maybe, in light of the myriad changes I’m undergoing, it’s less important to be organized than it is to be grounded, yet simultaneously malleable. My sleep schedule is erratic, my calendar is a mess, and my writing sessions are frequently interrupted, but even still, I manage to do things that ground me every single day. I take long nature walks and commune with the flora and fauna of the foothills. I cuddle with Kitty Kat Bad Boi in the treehouse each morning while ineffectually attempting to drink a cup of coffee. I play the same Philip Glass record every single time I sit down to write. I go to the yoga studio at least five times a week, even when I don’t feel like practicing. I’ve become a regular at my local watering hole, the quirky SoCal girl with a book at the bar, a place where everybody knows my name.

It’s disorienting at times, as metamorphoses tend to be, but if I look past the clutter and the chaos I can see the center and the ways in which I am aligned with it. I strip the peel of the fossilized banana and I find, even amidst the havoc of relocation and the discomfort of co-habitation, there are rituals that contain me, sacred acts that help me move through this transition with a modicum of grace. They don’t have to be orderly or methodical; they need only be mine.