The Docsplainer

Bugging Out

I used to say that if I had to bug out and knew I wasn’t coming back or that, if I did, the house might not still be here, there were three things I would take. (Obviously I would grab the animals first.)

1. The professional portrait of our first dog and cat that the late Mr. ‘Splainer surprised me with one Valentine’s Day back in the late 1970s.
2. His ashes.
3. My camera.

And my laptop, of course. Goes without saying.

But I’m older now, and getting older by the minute. And so sometimes I move through the house on some errand or other, thinking idly of what I would take if I ever had to downsize or move into assisted living: All the photos of him I’d taken over the years, my favorite books. Our wedding album and the couple or three photos we had framed and hung. Most all of the photos of my birth family, horses, dogs, etc. on the walls.

It’s funny to me that the career-related stuff, as much as I’ve always identified with work, does not make the cut. The diplomas and certificates and licenses and my professional library will go in the trash. Won’t miss it.

What Stays Behind

What it’s going to kill me to leave behind is the stuff that can’t go, like the concrete bird bath Mr. ‘Splainer brought home for us one day in the back of his pickup because he saw it in the Home Depot and knew I’d want one. The glass shower door he installed (crazy, I know, but). The deck he and my best friend built the week I turned 35. The yellow English rose My Grandmother the Rose Breeder gave his mother the weekend they met that has been here since my in-laws downsized 40 years ago.

And speaking of my grandmother… in the South, and maybe elsewhere, it used to be A Thing back in the day that you gave newlyweds plants from your garden to start theirs in their new home: I have dozens of daffodils coming up every spring from bulbs my grandmother dug and packed and shipped across two states back in ’83 when we built this house, and near a dozen daylilies from root stock that dates at least back to the 1930s, when she and my grandfather built their house. (These things are indestructible: She knew better than to trust me with a rose.) It is going to kill me to leave them, too. I call them The Grandmothers and it gladdens my heart to see their little white and yellow and orange heads bobbing in the sunshine every spring and summer: It will be like leaving her. And what about the magnolia that came from my mother-in-law’s condo when she could no longer live independently? No bigger than Mr. ‘Splainer when it got here, it’s about 3 stories tall now and nearly as wide as my two-car garage, blooming beautifully as we speak. And, as I have some of my other trees, I’ve named her. I am attached.

It will be nearly as hard to leave the 10th or 12th generation of songbirds, hawks, crows, and owls who visit or breed in that garden (which is a jungle of weeds and poison ivy now, but that’s another story for another day) and the little woods behind the house–not to mention the twice-yearly flyovers of cranes and the bats and swifts and nighthawks in summertime–and the birdhouses and feeders Mr. ‘Splainer put up for me years ago and the rabbits and possums and. Whew.

This Too Shall Pass

But I am learning that all things are transient: Anything that can come into being can and will cease to exist sooner or later. We are all, objects and organisms, changing constantly, dependent on ever-changing conditions for our existence and ultimate non-existence. We are born, we grow old. We become ill, we die.

The grandparents are gone. The in-laws are gone, along with half a dozen dear friends. The horses, the dogs, the cat, the parakeet–all gone. One day I will be, too. If I have to leave this place, be it for a hurricane or old age or fire, these things will all be gone from my life. If nothing else, when I die–the ultimate act of leaving a place–I will certainly have to say goodbye to them all.

All this attachment to things and beings is nothing but trouble, in the meantime: One worries about acquiring them, and then about hanging on to them–and one grieves (or rages, or cracks up) when, inevitably, one can hold on no longer.

What the Hell

I know you’re wondering by this point what the hell this has to do with psychology. Because Westerners psychologically identify with their bodies, their jobs, their relationships, their things, without even thinking about it. It is assumed that we are our bodies, our thoughts and feelings, our homes, our possessions. So what even am I banging on about?

But the whole world doesn’t think that way! Buddhist psychology, for example, teaches just the opposite–that desire is suffering, grasping is suffering, clinging is suffering, and that there is no self to be found in bodies, homes, cars, and what have you. Not even in children or pets or spouses. One practices:

This is impermanent.

This is unsatisfactory.

This is not me. This is not mine. I am not this.

And so, maybe, when it’s time to go–for whatever reason–I’ll be able to just… go.