She Lets Herself Go

     My earliest lessons were taught to me in 1950's Southern kitchens, where the solid, aproned wise-women of my childhood rolled out their dough for biscuits and shelled their peas into colanders. I lurked around the edges of those busy rooms, my ears pricked like a pony's for The Secrets of Life. Against the soothing background murmur of woman-talk, I listened for a certain change of pitch, the suddenly altered tone--yellow highlighter for the human voice--signalling me that my presence had been forgotten and something of substance was about to be revealed at last. Gossip is the litany of lessons offered by bad example. And it was risky business, my furtive education, for I inevitably heard things that disturbed and haunted me, as all children must.  I heard few phrases more ominous or more confusing, than this: She let herself go.

     What could that mean?! I was given to believe that letting oneself go would invariably lead to woe, particularly for women. Husbands would fail to come home from sales trips; daddies would take up with floozies and abandon their children; why, they might do Lord Knows What if their wives didn't hold onto themselves properly.  Grown children stayed away in droves from the matron who'd let herself go.  Why, Henny Penny, the sky would fall!  I took that lesson very much to heart and I've tried...honestly, I have...to hold onto myself at any cost, but there's a conspiracy at work out there, folks. Have you noticed? Our very own genes are in on it. The outlook is dire, ladies...and gentlemen, for I've seen a few careless, alledgedly self-discarded guys before and it's not a bit prettier than the feminine version.

     You might say I spent all my years in school trying to figure out just what that fateful phrase could mean and how to avoid falling prey to it. I've concluded we're not just talking about abdominal tone, here. There's a lot more involved than merely avoiding wearing loafers without socks or letting cellulite take roost in your inner thighs. There's a Self involved, and, once admitted, it complicates things a lot.

     The problem is that there has always been such a confusing smorgasbord of Self-nesses, usually put forward by serious people for our serious consideration.  Moral philosophers from Confucius to Kant have argued the nature of the Self.  Eastern philosophies and most world religions advocate selflessness; I grew up in churches as well as in kitchens and was always confounded by how hard unselfishness was to attain.  Hans Kohut founded a whole school of theory and treatment known as Self-Psychology.  It calls for more subtlety than I possess to explain why masturbation was called "self-abuse" in the first half of the twentieth century, except to say that it was always a darn hard thing to get one's hands wrapped around.

     The eighties and nineties glorified the Self with its own magazine. The self-development of children is carefully monitored and adults are told to seek self-actualization.  Neurologists and brain mappers are busy trying to nail down the locus of the self in that meat computer we call a brain  (my favorite writer on this subject, V.S. Ramachandran, published  The Neurology of The Self in 2007, which I recommend, but it won't clear up your confusion much).  And some of the world's niftiest gadgets and experiences have grown out of someone just looking for something to do with themselves.    I'm one of the grownups, now, and there have been a few gently deluded souls who have thought me wise , but neither I nor anyone else seems to know what the Self is or how best to handle it.  Please tell me what, "Just be yourself," means.

     Whatever it is, this self of mine, (which I arguably possess and should either be careful not to let go or should let go as soon as possible if I hope to have a good time), is moving inexorably toward letting go of me.  Now, with age, there is the undeniable decomposition of the body, but also an apparent massive assault on the psychological entities we elders call our "selves."  Our children don't treat us like they did when they were younger.  Twenty-somethings look at us with outright hostility when all we did was stand there in their grocery line.  Employers aren't interested in what we've done before, and marketers, those vultures of the media highways, can't even be induced to really notice what we need or use.  As we attend the hospital beds and funerals of our parents and our peers, we notice that we aren't really quite as solid, ourselves, as we might have thought.

     I have come closest to experiencing that thing called bliss at the moments when I have utterly forgotten myself.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (cheeks-uh-ma-high) wrote that flow occurs when we are wrapped up in tasks that are so absorbing, we tend to essentially lose track of time, place, and self, and that this state is so pleasurable, we humans seek it high and low...often in all the wrong places.  The sweat lodge victims sought to have one culminating experience that allowed them to leave their sorry, nagging, needy senses of self behind at last...and we can all know compassion for them in that wish, if not understanding of the method they signed up for.  For less intense selves, art, the natural world, and even Sudoku, Tetris, or Free Cell offer some respite from our run-own self talk.  Writing has always had that coveted effect on me, at least when it goes well;  when my sentences are engaged in self-abuse (see above), I am all too acutely aware that myself is in the way of my thoughts.  

     I begin to believe that Scott Peck nailed it when he said that the last quarter of life is about getting really good at letting things go.  What if I let my hair go to the color (or lack of it, in fact) that it wants to be?  What if I allow my core to sink south somewhat, if it insists upon doing so, Pilates and all?  What if I stop trying to look twenty years younger?  What if I refuse to take any of those on-line tests that tell you what your Real Age is or should be?  What if I choke the next person who tells me I'm only as old as I think...no, wait, that might dissuade your comments.  I'm not talking about flinging myself dejectedly to ill winds, but I am talking about bowing to the inexorable direction of things. Perhaps it isn't possible to enjoy oneself in old age without letting oneself go a little.

     Will the sky fall on me?  Will it fall on you?  Is there a time to quit trying so hard, and when is that?  You tell me.  I'm tickled to have just learned that there's a country music song to go with this post.  Those country music people really know how to let themselves go.