The Feeling of Falling Behind

          There are two meditation retreats that I will help to organize in the coming months, but somehow I had put off the planning. Regret comes to mind, and then a sense of disbelief. How did I let myself fall behind so much on these things? This isn’t the person I am accustomed to.  I recall a dream that often terrifies me a little bit. It is the one where I have two weeks to prepare for an exam, and I haven’t attended a single class. It is the one where I begin to wonder why I had waited for so long to address what I had missed.

                

           I am normally the sort of person who plans things way in advance. I set deadlines for myself even on a daily basis at work. I think I have been schooled in the idea that I should try to set a target every day, even if I never quite reach that target in the end.

Shifu Sheng Yen has also compared making vows to setting a target, when he remarks that it is better to have a vow and break it than to never have a vow at all. I tend to extend this idea to daily life. I am under the impression that having something to aim for is more productive than having an attitude of ‘just do what I can’. Is it possible that the mind requires these skillful means to experience what its own capabilities are? I am not sure.  I contemplate this question as I go to the dentist today.     

In the dentist’s office, a dental hygienist dressed in green with a white face-mask greets me and ushers me to the dentist’s chair. I hunker down into the chair as she prepares her instruments. The dentist’s office starts to look more child-friendly.  Some instruments have purple handles, which are reminiscent of the grape flavored candies we used to have as kids. It reminds me of mimicry. The instruments now try to resemble precisely the kinds of candies that the dentists tell the kids to avoid.

The dental hygienist quizzes me, just as I am about to have instruments in my mouth. She asks me how work is going and whether I have any vacation in July. She smiles throughout. I can’t see the smile from behind her sterile mask. But I can hear it in her voice.

“What is the last movie you went to see?” Her voice is ebullient as she pokes the jagged crevasses of my back teeth.

I draw a blank. I laugh nervously between gulps of air.

“I think it must have been Interstellar,” I venture.  But I start to search for more recent movies that I must have seen in between.

The hygienist gasps. Yes, it seems quite a while since I had last seen a movie. I must have left it behind some time ago. And what happened? I feel a yawning abyss. I picture tracks in a vast snow-covered field being covered by more and more snow. Soon there are hardly any traces of where the tracks had been. I can’t see, through all the haze, why I haven’t seen a movie in a while, any more than I can tell why I fell behind with my project planning.

“Too busy,” I murmur. My head sinks back into the blue vinyl pillow.

“I heard that there is going to be a new Vacation movie. But Chevy Chase looks so different now from when he first started those movies.”

I nod.

“Not that he needs to make any more movies,” the hygienist points out. She pokes into the gum line just above my front teeth.  A sharp string shoots up into the top of my gums. I taste a faint metallic tinge of blood. I worry what the hygienist thinks of my flossing habits.

“He should be getting royalties from the Christmas Vacation movie alone,” I reply.

The hygienist laughs. She leans forward and tells me to open wider to get to the back teeth.

This banter goes on for a while. We start to lament a career that was big in the 80s but might have hit a steep decline in the ensuing decades. I start to feel more relaxed than before. Gone was the fear that I would be scolded for neglecting my flossing routine. I sink deeper into the couch. I feel protected by the mint-flavored polish she administers into my mouth, in generous helpings. My mouth slowly fills with gritty sand as the spinning wheel cuts away the plaque. A spray of saliva and food jets out in sprinkles just within my range of sight.

When the hygienist finishes her cleaning, she gives some final tips on flossing.  Her voice remains calm and polite. She notifies me of the ridge of a bony stray tooth that needs extra care. This tooth hides somewhere between two other jutting teeth.  It looks forever eclipsed and overshadowed by the dominant teeth around it. Then she hands me a new instrument called a Sulcabrush, which promises to be even easier than the handle-floss I had been using in the previous years. In fact, it resembles the kind of brush I used to clean cassette tape heads. It doesn’t look like it could brush more than a little dust. Yet, it looks so gentle. I decide to give it a try later in the evening.

As I leave the dentist’s office, I think: this time I will try to be more present with everything. I won’t procrastinate. This is a fresh start. My teeth feel more spacious. I stick a piece of peppermint gum in my mouth to try to preserve that fresh, clean feeling. But then the pressure awaits me as I hop on the train. I wonder how much I need to do to catch up.  I decide to detour into the dollar store to buy a hardbound notebook. After purchasing the notebook, I write on the cover, “Keith Brown- tasks”.  This will be my new task list that will prevent me from falling behind.

But thoughts have a way of getting complicated. I wonder, is there ever a way to measure that from which we fall behind? And isn’t the measured life not  such a real life at all? It is like writing down tasks in a book. While this can be a useful thing to do, and certainly worth my while, it doesn’t tell me what I need to value the most. To do that requires a heart that doesn’t cling to things.  If I am always worried about meeting every standard around me, I might end up forgetting what is most fundamental for growing into a human being.

 So while it is certainly a good tool to have a task list, I question whether that is the real measure of what is deepest to me in life. And of course, the dance is like this: I pave a road, the trees grow into it; I stray from the road, the map pushes me back; I stare at the map and lose the scenery; the map blows away, the scenery returns. Soon the map and the scenery are all the same reminders. And the road is covered in snow again.