And I don’t want a tourist experience of my life.
To partake in a rich life, I need biodiversity. I need both the respites of security and the moments of risk. The times I say “fuck it” and the times I buckle down and get to work. The times I sacrifice for my children, my job, my loved ones, and the times I claim my own moment in the sun. One side without the other is not balanced. My life, until now, has been one long surrender. That isn’t good for me, for my children, my family, my friends. I have been only half alive. The only way to be truly present, I am learning, is first to be truly present to myself. To experience my wildness fully. To reintroduce risk and biodiversity. To ask question like the researchers. To not know. To risk the wolves, the fire, the sea stars. To be willing to evolve or die.
Any motorcyclist knows one truth as a fact of physics. When trying to make a tight turn, you cannot pull back and you cannot go halfway. If you fail to lean your full body weight into the turn, you will not make it. To survive, we have to take the counterintuitive approach. Lean into what scares you with all your might. Throw your body into that turn even when it feels like it will kill you.
•CHAPTER NINETEEN•
EIGHT DAYS IN PARADISE
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily.
To not dare is to lose oneself.
—SOREN KIERKEGAARD
The air temperature on the island of Mo’orea is eighty-four degrees at this very moment. There’s a slight breeze. The water, not a thirty-second stroll from where I sit, is eighty degrees and the most crystalline turquoise I have ever seen, visibility measured in the tens of meters. I watch paddlers glide by in outrigger canoes. The occasional sailboat crosses the lagoon. Palm fronds shiver in the wind. A flying fish breaks the surface. The day is nearly silent. A coconut bobs on the water.
Be. Here. Now.
I look at my feet—where am I on this planet?—and repeat that three-word mantra. Because if I don’t, I will ruin the eight days I have left here in paradise, thinking about, waiting for what has not yet, and may not ever, come to pass.
In the three months I’ve been here, getting the closest approximation of a suntan I’m ever likely to experience, I swim daily in Cook’s Bay, visit sparsely populated atolls, wear a pareu around my hips and a flower in my hair, drink mango juice, and eat papayas from the tree outside my bedroom. This is the first time in nearly thirty years I’ve been away from the pressures of daily life.
Yet I want to go home.
And I want to kick myself for even having the thought.
Next week, when I return to my apartment in Los Angeles, I will go back to regular working hours and commuting through traffic. I have to schedule a dental appointment, deal with the contentious details of divorce and the sale of our family home, issues I’ve shelved by my absence. Who wants to go back to that?
Why then am I counting down the days until I climb aboard a jumbo airliner and fly back across the Pacific Ocean?
What’s next? That seems to be the question I’ve been asking my entire life, unable, unwilling to stay with what is, expecting whatever’s next to be better somehow than what’s happening now. The grass is always greener. Except that it isn’t. And I’m old enough to know better.
I remember being pregnant with Hope, my third child, and impatient at the end of the pregnancy. Can’t we just get this over with already? Can’t we move on to meeting this child and starting a relationship with her? There are times now when I wish I could go back there, to the exasperated, tetchy woman I had been and sit with her, experience fully the last time she’d ever feel a child move within her. Or the last time she’d nurse a child. Or the last time the family she’d created would live together under the same roof. But she can’t.
I can’t. I wished every one of those moments away, looking for what was next, and they are gone forever.
So why do I want to leave so badly now?
Part of the problem is a man.
• • •
I was doing research from Mo’orea into the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical I know plays a deep and abiding role in my yearning for adventure and risk. I was curious about the entire dopaminergic system and how it varies by individual in hopes of better understanding what is driving me. Much of the research I found was difficult to digest without formal training in neuroscience. Then I happened upon the work of a biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers University. She is a human behavior researcher and has studied romantic interpersonal attraction for more than thirty years. I wasn’t so much interested in the romantic part of her work, but her books gave succinct descriptions on how differing brain chemicals motivate us and our desires. Finally able to understand on a basic but cogent level how and why these chemicals do what they do, I was intrigued.
Fisher considers four brain chemicals key in determining personality traits. According to her model, dopamine is the chemical that drives “explorers” like me, those who seek novelty, who are willing to take risks, who thrive on curiosity, creativity, and spontaneity. Serotonin rules the roost with “builders,” those who are conventional, calm, moral, respectful of authority, and rule-based. Those driven by testosterone tend to be “directors.” Their traits are to be analytical, self-controlled, independent, competitive, and decisive. Estrogen, meanwhile, makes for “negotiators” who are social, intuitive, sympathetic, idealistic, tolerant, and agreeable. Though we all have both primary and secondary chemicals of these four that drive us, the primary chemical is the one she most closely focuses on.
Each of these four brain chemicals, she argues, can be traced back to their evolutionary roots across the eons. As our forebears became established in ancient Africa five million years ago, people with these different dispositions took on different roles in their communal groups. “The ancestors of contemporary Explorers roamed far into the dangerous grass, returning with meat, nuts, and information. The antecedents of today’s cautious Builders guarded the group and gradually built the rituals of tribal life. The predecessors of our modern mechanically minded Directors invented better spears and traps and calculated the coming of the rains and waning of the moon. And the forebears of today’s imaginative and intuitive Negotiators held the group together with their social skills,” she explains.
Fisher then extrapolates who matches up with whom best romantically based on these chemicals, positing that explorers generally do best with other explorers (they become playmates together), as builders likewise thrive when paired with others like them. In these pairings, the birds of a feather concept is at work. On the other hand, directors generally do best with negotiators and vice versa, demonstrating the other adage, opposites attract.
She’s careful to note two additional brain chemicals that should also be factored in: norepinephrine, a chemical closely related to dopamine, which undoubtedly contributes to some of the explorers’ traits, especially their energy and impulsivity. And oxytocin, a chemical synthesized, stored and triggered (in large part) by estrogen. This is the same chemical Paul J. Zak will attempt to measure in me, both before and after riding the motorcycle. Oxytocin most likely plays a role in the negotiator’s compassion, trust, and intuition. But none of these chemicals acts alone. Rather, families of chemicals produce the traits Fisher labels as explorer, builder, director, and negotiator, and the specific activities of any one chemical are not as significant as the ratios and interactions among all of them.
Nevertheless, only dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen have been directly associated with a wide range of personality traits. The cocktail of these four chemicals most likely forms the foundation of these basic styles of thinking and belonging.
Fisher’s research attracted the attention of an online dating service startup. They hired her to develop a questionnaire based on her theories of compatibility. The result was Chemistry.com, an online sister service of Match.com that operates similarly, but with pairings based on brain chemistry as its organizing principle. According to the Chemistry.com
website, as of June 2013, more than eight million people have taken the Chemistry.com personality test. (You can, too: http://www.chemistry.com/lovemap/questionnaire.aspx).
Of course, being the curious explorer I am, I had no choice but to take the test. I signed up to see if what Fisher posited could be seen as true in my life. Keep in mind that during the time I’ve been single, I’ve set up numerous online dating profiles only to pull them down the moment emails started coming in. Being contacted by strange men was too odd and out of my frame of reference. I couldn’t respond to a single one. But as long as I looked at Chemistry.com as a form of research, I figured I could explore this online dating world from the distance of four thousand miles with no real skin in the game, so to speak. Maybe I could develop some flirting chops after twenty-five years atrophying without having to actually meet anyone. The perfect training-wheels situation.
Except that I met someone. Another explorer, like me.
Only we haven’t met.
R suggested we become “pen pals.” Since I’d be out of the country for the next six weeks, I said yes. We’ve been writing and texting and emailing, exchanging photos, talking via a smartphone app. Every few days he talks about getting on a plane and flying to French Polynesia so we can finally meet. It’s been so very long since someone has shown a deep interest and since I’ve been ready to get to know someone else.
I worry, though, in quiet times. If I wasn’t so far away, I might not be as forthcoming. It’s easy to fess up to all kinds of things when you’re separated by this many miles and have no way to meet in person anytime soon. I tell him not to fly here; I’ll be back in L.A. soon. He asks me to come home early and I’m considering it. Maybe the anonymity of the Internet is allowing a deeper intimacy to develop because it’s not really real. And yet, I don’t care. I’m having fun.
Still, from my research into Fisher’s work, I learn more about explorers like me and this man with whom I’m in communication. It’s like crack cocaine, the incessant flood of messages we’re sending each other, inciting the need for more, more, more. I don’t think I’ve ever dated an explorer before. That must be what has been missing in my life. If I’d known this magical stuff earlier, maybe I would have married a fellow explorer and my life would have been different.
I learn from Fischer that my sensation-seeking disposition is largely inherited. The gene labeled D4DR I mentioned earlier controls much of the dopaminergic system in the brain regions used for thinking, feeling, and motivation, and a specific allele of this gene is associated with several types of novelty seeking. “Old or young; male or female; rich or poor; educated in the ivory tower or in the mean streets: people who have inherited this gene in the dopamine system have an appetite for variety.”
Contrary to popular belief, women in their teens and twenties are just as eager as men to chase new experiences, though they tend to prefer exploring nontraditional music, visual art, drugs, the intellectual fringes, and spiritual practices rather than physical challenges.
While, as we’ve seen, this hunger for adventure generally declines with age in both men and women as levels of dopamine decrease, older sensation seekers continue their exploration throughout their lifetimes by reading, traveling, going to the theater and movies, listening to music, attending arts events, and pursuing creativity in myriad ways. “Moreover,” Fisher explains, “middle-aged women begin to score higher than men in overall sensation seeking. They buy more books. And they support the travel and leisure industry—cajoling their partners to accompany them to the Great Wall of China, Victoria Falls, Patagonia, or myriad local cultures.”
She got that one right. And my interaction with this man is probably just another form of sensation seeking. Still, here I am, having this exchange and enjoying it all immensely. Our discussions are wide-ranging and interesting. He’s smart and funny. I want to meet him, which will require ending my paradise hiatus, and risking the potential destruction of this innocent, just-getting-to-know-you phase.
How angry will I be if I return home early to find out this vacation romance was nothing of substance and that I squandered my last few days in paradise thinking about something that was only an illusion? And yet, from this perspective, it’s all so alluring.
Be. Here. Now.
I know the truth: If it weren’t for this romantic prospect, I would have found something else, some other “next” to draw me away from what’s here and now. This is one of the downsides to being an explorer. We can be so optimistic that whatever’s coming is going to be better than we have now that we fail to appreciate what is happening now.
Either way, things change. What was great at first becomes less great over time. What was skull-crushingly painful in the moment eventually heals. Nothing remains static. There will never be a day in my life with every detail lining up in perfect harmony so that I may capture that moment and press it in a book for posterity.
Besides, thinking about home is another channel to distraction. Being fully present, even in paradise, is not always easy. The three months I’ve been away have given me time to put things into perspective, to come to see who I am as a human in this world and to step away from that imagined mother I had created for the past twenty-six years. Being alone and mostly unable to converse with people for much of this time has been good for me. I have cried a lagoon worth of tears over the end of my marriage and how I should have known better, intervened sooner, been smarter, sexier, somehow changed the course of events. I have also missed my three grown children in a way that will be, I must remind myself, the new normal.
Be. Here. Now.
I tell R I need to stay until the end of my scheduled time away. I have few plans for the next eight days. Some writing. An afternoon swim. A walk or two. Everything seems to be winding down and that’s the hardest time for me. I’m good at the planning stage. I’m less good at seeing things through. But that’s what I’m hoping to do now. To feel the water as it’s on my skin, smell the fruity air near the pineapple plantation, enjoy the warmth of the breeze and try not to wish I were somewhere else. Because we all know the truth: The moment I get home, I’ll start wishing I was back here again.
So I keep reminding myself of today’s reality. The air temperature on the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia is eighty-four degrees right at this moment. There’s a slight breeze blowing. The water is eighty degrees . . .
Be. Here. Now.
• • •
He walks into the neighborhood coffee shop and introduces himself. There’s an awkward hug and kiss and the medicine ball slam of truth slams my solar plexus. I have been so misguided. How could I think I might know someone I’d never met? The clumsy reality is like a bad smell, filling the space between us. There’s nothing here. No spark, no frisson. Nada. I spent that last six weeks in paradise obsessing over this person who is not at all whom I’d made him out to be.
It’s a good lesson. If I have a strong enough desire, I can make anything over into what I want it to be. I made R into someone he’s not in order to match my own desires and needs, and he did the same with me. I constructed and assembled him from the smallest of details: photos, the sound of his voice, a few of his stories. But I didn’t know him. I created him whole cloth, the perfect man. Only he isn’t. And it’s taking this unpleasant shock of recognition to see that. We both see it.
I’m back in smoggy L.A. with no wonderful man after all, having left behind paradise in a rush. Be. Here. Now. I’m no longer on Mo’orea with its crystal-clear water, but my life is about to unfold in a new and bigger way. I will put this man behind me. Reclaim my little rental space. Light a candle. Dance around in the dark. Relish being single. Become aware of my intrinsic wholeness. Feel the pulse of my being.
•CHAPTER TWENTY•
FAILING (AND FALLING) BETTER
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—ANAIS NIN
It’s 9:00 AM on a frigid Janua
ry morning in the town of Ouray, Colorado, population one thousand. Located ten miles northeast of Telluride (but a fifty-mile drive due to the severity of the landscape), Ouray is known as the “Switzerland of America” because of its setting at the narrow head of a valley, enclosed on three sides by steep, granite peaks. Dramatic mountains lurch up all around me, rising so fast from the valley floor I feel dizzy looking at them. The vistas seem even more intense through the spectral air. It’s like Mo’orea, but for those who prefer snow. The cottages, shops, and steepled church are postcard-worthy, as are the people and dogs that briskly pass. Everyone has that burnished skin that comes from living in the cool clean air. I feel like I’m in a Patagonia catalog.
I should be drinking in this striking locale and all it has to offer. I should be soaking up its natural gorgeousness, breathing in the rugged magnificence of this planet and be filled with gratitude to be alive today.
But I’m not.
I’m sitting in a Subaru, trying to talk myself off a ledge. I have come to join in the Ouray Ice Festival, where participants take clinics in the finer points of ice-climbing, a sport that involves chopping and bashing up vertical frozen waterfalls. For the past half hour, a continuous stream of climbers has been walking past the car, anxious to get to the pitches to try out or improve their skills. They’re all cinched into sturdy climbing harnesses, carabineers clanging from gear loops, helmets to protect precious brain matter. They carry their ice tools like gunslingers and clomp about in heavy boots fit with twelve-point crampons that sound like crushing pottery on the hard-pack snow.
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