Don't Hold Your Breath

I grew up with wholesome, Midwestern ideas about how to succeed in life, mostly modeled by my dad, a junior-high band director (one of those blessed souls who launched thousands of us bratty, bombastic musicians!).  

He grew up on a dairy farm, milking Holsteins by hand alongside his father, and he painted houses in our small town in the summers, a second job he never begrudged (to me, anyway) to pay our way. Good-natured with a hint of mischief, he couldn’t tell a joke without bungling the punchline, so instead, he bandied mantras: “Use those bootstraps,” “Try, try again,” and especially, “No pain, no gain.” 

The message I took, as I outgrew my Nebraska hometown, was: “Get harder.”  

I got a degree. (“Buckle down.”) I got married. (“Forgive, and forgive again.”) I landed in the Mountain West and started a career as a writer, off route from the safe, stable teaching degree I was supposed to have earned. (“Finish what you start.”)  

I got strong (mountain sports, Pilates, dance). I pinched pennies. I built a reputation of grit and strong opinion (to live up to having red hair). I moved. I built a farm and a brand. I clenched my teeth in my sleep and woke with shoulders so tight the fascia crackled like cellophane. 

And then, my first child was stillborn. And my second came into the world so prematurely her life is marked by it. My marriage took on bedfellows—festering habits, incompatible ambitions, and insecurities—that it didn’t have room for. Our brand sold, and our priorities and lifestyle shifted. 

My dad succumbed to lymphoma before the hair that fell out had turned completely gray, and the impenetrable shell I’d shellacked for myself started deflecting what I needed most: Small kindnesses of help. The soft rain of change. The courage to admit I am good at achieving hard things and an utter novice at the opposite, which is not “easy.” It’s, “Here. Now.” 

That’s where mindfulness found me, in allowing myself to just be. To stop holding my breath to muscle through the next test or climb the next pitch. To release my reliance on distant ideas of security. (“If I do this, then....”) And to understand, in each tiny sensation, that I’m living the story of my life. Not later; now. And just then. And now. And again. 

I’m not cured of my one-way pursuit of success by my dad’s metrics. I still have ideas about the shape of my legacy and the mark I want to make. And I forget, often, to stop and be mindful, many moments of the day.  

But I am getting better, not “harder” anymore, and I’m closer to understanding what my dad may have actually meant by “pain” and “gain.” I want to sit in each of them, not as one dependent on the other. The work itself is “hard,” but I am, finally, open to it. 

My dad, one Midwestern summer day