Are You Experienced? (A Few Notes for my Birthday)

I was listening to Jimi Hendrix this morning. “Are You Experienced?” is a brilliant question, as well as a trippy Boomer-Rock classic. So, I asked myself, over the last year, hell, over the last 50 years, have I been experienced?

Perhaps…

I’ve experienced childbirth and heartbreak. I’ve experienced self-transcendence and self-pity. I’ve travelled abroad; and I’ve ventured into the truly perilous territory of personal trauma and healing. Sometimes the most important places we go are inside us.

When I weigh the importance of my experiences, it would be easy to list things that are perceived as accomplishments, like the big grant that I secured for a nonprofit or the community award that made my uncle proud. Those things have emotional weight.

However, ordinary human moments are the ones that have changed me the most. Common life experiences have had unexpected emotional complexity with the power to transform my soul and redirect my life.

Here are some of those ordinary/extraordinary experiences that rocked my world:

·         The feeling of awe and overwhelm at holding my first baby for the first time. The birth was rough and we were both lucky to be alive. When I was okay, the midwife put my baby on my belly. My baby and I looked at each other as if to say, “What just happened?”

·         The feeling of pure joy when the obstetrician put my second baby on my belly. My sweet little baby looked at me with one eye opened and one eye closed: eagle eye. I said aloud, “I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve waited so long!”

·         The moment my first husband told me he wanted a divorce. I was devastated, confused, and terrified. Underneath these feelings was hope and relief. Oh, thank the Lord, I thought, I don’t have to live with this crap anymore.

·         Watching my younger son turn to leave when our family dropped him off at the airport hotel to be shipped off to boot camp. Talk about complex feelings! Grief mixed with concern and fear of an unknown future. I was also proud of him and relieved to have him launch. It was a lot of emotion.

·         Saying goodbye to my father the last time I saw him. He died a couple weeks later. I had been estranged from him for two decades before this visit. I sat by his hospital bed for hours, not talking about anything important. Then I needed to go. I stood up, looked into his eyes, and said, “My kids will be home from school soon. I need to leave.” Between us was an emotional landscape so vast and treacherous that it was better left untraveled. We let it be. My father remains one of the cruelest people I’ve ever met, sadly. He was also one of the most creative and inspired people I’ve known.

These experiences don’t make the front page of the newspaper. They are not of any import to human history, or even its future. But they matter to me. These kinds of experiences matter to most people: they define our lives. It’s the commonness of them that links us together in empathy and understanding.

I’m not sure what Jimi was referring to by “experience”, but I’ve seen things I wish to forget, and still seek wonders I can’t imagine. I’m sitting on a pendulum between fatigue from living so much and anticipation for living more.

Jimi asks, “Are you experienced?” to which I can answer: “Yes. I am.”