Nora and I had a tense day yesterday. We're both so eager for our new lives to start that we can both get ahead of ourselves, dealing with the next thing instead of focusing on each other now. Gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta do the other... and her list of obsessions and my list of obsessions don't perfectly align, so we don't have the same next thing. And because the future's not here yet, I still have to drive back to Boston every Sunday, so there's that tension added into the mix.
But Nora also reminded me that it's not only the future that weighs on us. She introduced me to a Yiddish word, the dybbuk or demon. More accurately, I discovered today, the dybbuk is the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls her or his behavior.
Yeah, I got some of those. More than a few of them were me.
When I was in my late 20s, I went to a weight-loss group. I thought I needed it. But of course, it was really my dybbuk who needed it. At that moment, I weighed 134 pounds, was running 35 miles a week, able to 10K in 39 minutes and ride my bike over the ridge of the Coast Range and back for Sunday fun. But the person who went to those meetings was still twelve years old, the fat kid who got picked last for baseball; all I could see in the mirror was that wandering soul who told me what to do.
When I finished my Ph.D., I had several unsuccessful years on the job market, couldn't find a publisher for my first book, watched improbable colleagues land improbable tenure-track jobs. I thought I was done. But that was my dybbuk advising me, the wandering soul who needed the all-A report card, needed to have someone else tell him that he was good.
When I worked for a security consultant, doing the same job for each client by erasing cells in the algorithm and filling in a few new ones; or when I worked for the school reform organization that had no interest in kids and their needs, I thought I was being ignored. But really, it was my dybbuk who felt ignored, the wandering soul with the oversized ideas and the missing family.
I carry far too many dybbukim. They're heavy, make me less supple, place obstacles that are no less challenging for being unreal. It's harder to find my malekh, the good angels. There are at least as many of those in my past as there are disturbed spirits, but they don't crowd the stage like the dybbuk. The dybbuk are kind of like conspiracy theorists — they don't make a lot of sense, but they make a lot of noise, and they can't be convinced by fact or logic or persistence.
The malokhemlekh like quiet. They come out like hummingbirds, when there's no sudden movements and the air is calm. If you sit on the porch with an iced tea and a wife, and look at the mountains and the freshly mown lawn, sometimes they appear. You can't seek them out, but they'll find you if you don't move too fast.
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