Preserving Mental Hygiene

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I am filled today with an incredible sadness.  Maybe something of the despair of the city has gotten into me.  Maybe I’m just tired.  Maybe it’s both.

I find myself looking deeply into the eyes of the old people I pass on the street to feel what they might feel.  I enter their window of hopelessness and despair.  I walk the streets today allowing myself to experience what it might feel like to live in one of these filthy little alleyway apartments with rats scurrying across the floor, and the smell of piss and sewage everywhere knowing that this is all I will ever have. 

There is no way out.  This is it.  I don’t have opportunity for anything different.  I can’t make enough money to even buy food or clothes, much less to get a passport to get out of this place.  There is no change coming here.  Nothing will ever be any different than it is now and my whole existence is simply to try to survive another day.

It’s a good practice and an incredible window to the reality that is here.  I let myself spend some hours in this space walking back and forth to my little room throughout the day until finally I come across some music and I stop there for relief from my thoughts.

A very handsome couple stands next to me chatting.  She is a beautiful young woman and he’s a very handsome tall man.  She gives me his hand, “Baila.. baila, el es mi hermano.. baila..”  I am ready to dance and happy to oblige, but apparently I don’t know this dance or I’m just nervous, and I feel like a dork with two left feet.  He is gentle and kind and helps me, and she is my cheerleader. 

The three of us end up spending the whole night together walking, talking, laughing, and sharing our hearts, stories and strangely our astrology.  I am in love with them by the end of the night, perhaps more her than him.  She is so bubbly, so adorably cute, so sassy and fun, so like me that I can’t help but enjoy her wildness. 

On the way back to my place after sitting at the Malacon chatting for hours, we come across a guitar player who serenades us and somehow entices me into some freestyle hip hop over the top of his Latin grooves.  We are all singing together, laughing and falling in love.  The guitar player and my new girlfriend kiss in front of her brother, and I can tell he is not impressed with his sister’s openness, but she is an untameable wild woman and she just laughs at her brother’s scowls. I find my mind wandering in the midst of this comical drama unfolding. 

Perhaps one of the most fascinating contradictions to me here is this sense of hopelessness and surrender that seems to create also this ability to shift into gratitude and appreciation for things that we in the US often take for granted.  Albeit it is indeed a sort of resigned acceptance here, but somewhere in it, Cubans have found an ability to be at peace in spite of their challenges, to find innovative solutions and to learn something from it that we in the US would be wise to consider: the willingness to stop complaining and find acceptance and peace regardless of the external conditions.  To appreciate the good things and focus on them rather than wasting a lifetime complaining and being pissed off about what is. 

I’ve been reading an incredible book, “Havana Real” by Yoani Sanchez, a woman here in Cuba who started a blog called Generation Y.  It’s a fascinating read and has been giving me deep insight into Cuban life from the perspective of someone who shares her story fearlessly in spite of her oppression.  She puts it this way, “A widespread call to inaction, in the name of preserving mental hygiene, has taken over Cubans’ ability to act.  The person who complains or demands is seen as “some kind of weirdo.”” 

People here have learned to find gratitude even in the midst of a pile of shit.  That to me is perhaps one of the things that makes this island so special.