YOGAJOURNAL.COM / 74 / FEBRUARY 2018
REFLECTION
ILLUSTRATION: ABIGAILBIEGERT“IT’S LIKE THIS.”
That’s what Will liked to say. Will, the meditation
guy from my husband Edward’s office. Will, who
had interesting answers to hard questions and didn’t
wear shoes. I met Will when I used to write in a
sunny corner of Edward’s office—a wonderland of
adjustable desks, nap pods, and unlimited kombu-
cha. When Edward’s boss offered me an empty
desk and welcomed me to partake in all the em-
ployee benefits, including mindfulness sessions
with Will, I said, “Amen, brother.”
Most of the time, I slipped into Will’s class,
lowered myself onto a gray foam brick, and did a
crappy version of whatever he told us to do (breathe,
notice, release). Sometimes I’d linger and we’d talk.
One morning, after Will had led us through a
meditation about relationships and conflict, I said to
him, “When the shit hits the fan, even in situations
where I should have been able to see trouble coming,
I get crazy—like furious-crazy.” He nodded: “It’s a
very cool feature of the human mind that we keep
hoping our interactions are going to be different.”
Come again, Sock Man? Repeatedly expecting
things to be better than you know from experience
they will be—that’s cool?
He skated past my scrutiny. “Oh, I see,” he said,
pinpointing my pathology. “You have the illusion
that you can change people’s behavior.”
Yup.
Will smiled his meditation-teacher smile.
“But I want to grow out of the shock,” I told him.
“My teenagers are mean and moody. This is not new
news. Husbands are late and busy and distracted.
Whoopie. I missed the deadline for some field trip,
lost my new glasses. Oh well, oh well, oh well.”
“Oh well,” he said. “I like that. That’s good.”
“Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, ‘oh well’ usually
comes out of my mouth as ‘Motherf--ker.’”He laughed, then seeing I was not kidding, said,
“Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of peo-
ple go to war with reality.” This brand of acceptance
Will was talking about wasn’t grim compromise or
gritted-teeth tolerance. He wasn't suggesting that
we roll over but rather that we keep rolling, onward.
I already knew this. Resistance is the road to
bleeding ulcers, I’d joked with Edward. Only a fool
berates the gods over stretch marks and in-laws, I’d
speechified to my girlfriends over cocktails.
“Being in our lives as they are is probably one of
the most common struggles people have,” Will said.
Oh, my god, I’m a cliché, I thought, wondering if Mr.
Don’t Go to War With Reality got tired of telling us
janky mortals the same thing over and over. Here
I thought I was a special person with Special People
Problems, but I was everybody. And since I was ev-
erybody, a pocket of truism would suffice.
These days, when everything feels like it’s falling
apart, that phrase Will used to say bubbles up from
some well of memory: “It’s like this.” It reminds me
of a quiet truth: Life ends. I’ve known this since the
summer of 1972, when an ambulance drove away in
silence with the old lady who gave out Almond Joys
on Halloween. Recently, I’ve seen mortality do its
awful ghosting up close—two of my closest friends,
my father—which changed the context of everything.
Maybe Will’s phrase applies here, too. Minds
don’t rest, they reel and wander and fixate and roll
back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a
mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and
break and forgive and behold because it’s like this,
having a heart. Lives don’t last, they thrill and con-
found and circle and overflow and disappear because
it’s like this, having a life.
From the book Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan. Copyright © 2018 by
Kelly Corrigan. Published by Random House, an imprint and division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.It’s like this By Kelly Corrigan