House rejects bailout--good thing for the new year?

More on don't know mind. So the House has rejected a bailout deal, possibly because Republicans wanted to gouge out of this situation tax relief for the wealthy and refused to accept this deal as a result. I can't decide if I am grateful someone finally grew a pair and decided to allow the markets to be free markets and not to throw billions of dollars at the corrupt bunglers who got us into this mess. Or if I am so scared I want them just to go ahead and pass the thing. Does this remind anyone of the days after September 11th and the Patriot Act, or what? And only one person had the courage to just say, "It isn't acceptable to give the government sweeping powers just because we're scared." Yet here we are, doing something just as bad, just as sweeping, just as fundamental. I don't know enough to know what's the right and wrong move here--and I am afraid that no one does, no matter how sure they like to sound. The whole thing boggles the mind--with an awful awe, not the sort one wants to be cultivating going into the Days of Awe. I am utterly confused and sad about it all--and scared too. Ari and I have very little money to start with, so watching what little savings we have shrivel up is scary and means saying goodbye to having an apartment of our own, or a feeling of freedom in our future. All those dreams feel so far away now.

But we keep forging ahead because, really, what else can we do?

Last night, my mother stayed over so that she could go to the birthday party of a friend she has known for nearly 70 years, which is pretty amazing in and of itself. After, she sat around the table with me and one of the Roommates, sipping wine while I made inane suggestions about how to deal with the crisis. I still can't understand why we can't bring people to justice who started this shell game and walked away with millions in profits while the rest of us pay the price. Everyone kept patiently trying to explain this to me and telling me there was nothing we can do, while I said, "Yes we can! Break their windows! Get some rope!" OK, I do not think those are very mindful suggestions. I do not like even reflecting on those ugly and shrill suggestions. Yet I am curious why no one else is making them, perhaps some people who don't have such a commitment to peace and equanimity and compassion as myself.

I have been thinking about Winnicott often these days. Mostly in the context of the "good enough" mother. His idea--one that has permeated much of the psych world, I believe--is that the infant has a natural urge to be at one with his or her mother, and seeks to annihilate a mother's separateness. It is wondrous to know about that idea and then to watch it unfold. Ari delights in stepping on me, to knock me down, to in every loving and adorable way possible try to shred me and pretend there is "no mama there," and then a moment later pushes the hair from my face, presses his brow against mine, looks me deep in my eyes and kisses me. This is both cute and distressing, especially when you notice your own powerful drives and urges at work. Winnicott's idea of the "good enough" mother is one who can survive that assault without withdrawing in horror or retaliating. I certainly do withdraw, I know that--partly because I am not always up for the battle. And sometimes I over-react. Most of the time I strive for some "good enough" balance while I figure out how to do this mama thing.

It's like that being a therapist, too. You don't respond or react right away to what someone is telling you. You wait, you pay attention, you see what is needed. You don't have to do or say the perfect thing. You don' t have to solve or fix. You wait and balance yourself in that delicate flutter of silence and connection.

I feel we all are trying to figure it out--how to be a good enough citizen, leader, grandparent, partner, professional or worker--whatever it is that we do and how we are, however life's circumstances and our own hearts and minds devour us. We sit it out, wait it through, and then notice that however strange the world may seem to us, however perplexing the change may be, we can survive it. It will be good enough. Someday we will make a world for ourselves that will be good enough, as human beings, for us to live in without guilt and without fear. Or at least not too much of it.

We wait and think and wonder in these next few days--those of us who do observe the Days of Awe. We take a breath and then another and consider what it means to be a human, to bump up against other humans and to know--somehow--that for you this life is just as important as it is to me. I walk down the street, feel my feet on the pavement, pass a smoker in a doorway and people unloading goods from a truck and a woman with her baby and a sling and I try to notice that they matter as much as I do. I read the news, I feel myself being devoured by other people's fear and rage and sometimes I want to fight back. Sometimes I do fight back. Sometimes I wait, hovering, to see where the change is coming and sometimes I deliberately set myself in change's path. I worry and fret and wonder. And then brave people say brave things and change happens--look at Olmert reversing himself after 30 years. It can happen. Faith is a verb and moments like this are the times we choose it. However we choose it.