I'm sleeping better now that I'm in our basement, and perhaps it's the snow that gently drapes across the city now that helps too. I have our house to myself for a few days while we wait for the insulation to come in (we're using recycled denim insulation from Arizona), a welcome break from the last few days of constant ceiling activity. The contractors are great (how many people have ever said that?) but it's still hard to have people who need attention in the house day after day.

S and I have talked a few times the past week. Not today, but that's because he's back at his backward base at the craggly edge of Pakistan, the base that just two days ago began to have running water again. We talked about our marriage and our relationship, in part because of something I wrote to him about. I didn't share it here; it was too painful, the entire experience, and too personal. This painful experience I haven't written about was prompted, in part, by something I wrote on this blog. The entire experience made me think of the destructive potential of this chronicling of my life, and it made me nervous -- could I inadvertently destroy everything that I care about with my writing? That question scares me, in large part because I don't have the answer.

I think of blogs differently than I do of books. My blog attracts friends, of course (and some of you I've never met in person though we're still friends), but more often my readers are stumblers, people who had no intention of ending up here. If they stay around, sometimes it is because they share a kinship with me, but sometimes it's because they are voyeurs who come for a week or so then disappear back into the cyber ether. It's scary sometimes to think of it that way, how what I write here may be read by someone who doesn't care at all about me or S or anyone or anything I care about, and in fact might hate all that I love. Books are different than this, I think, because they involve a commitment, a pact, from the moment you put out the cash to buy them. If that commitment, that pact doesn't work out in the first hundred pages, the book is put down and forgotten, but the intimacy remains because something drove you to buy it in the first place. It wasn't just random google-chance. I think if I were to write a book about this year I would write about all of it, even what I've held back from sharing here because of the intimacy a book offers.

Yet still I write. And still here.

Today Zach posted about what he's done in Iraq, the regret he feels and whether anyone can be proud of him. His post made me think of the heaviness of what it really means to own your actions, the good and the bad, and how regret is part of the deal as soon as we are forced into the world as a tiny, bloody mess. It made me think, too, of how destructive the entire idea of "pride" is, and how false. How many lives have been lost from that one idea? It's heartbreaking to consider.

Last night I had the JOT workshop again, and a writer I'd never met who is battling cancer came for the first time in months. He shared this incredible short story about a pilot forced to land on top of a mountain because of his own mistake. He'd failed to check the plane over before taking off, so when several fuses were blown causing him to make an emergency landing, his first thought was how he'd have to record "pilot error" in the log book. The pilot managed to fix the plane himself and fly back home, only to fall asleep and dream of landing on a mountain top. It was seeped in a quiet sadness, this story of regret. Since the ultimate disaster was averted, it was also a story of how we can save ourselves sometimes, even when we're the reason we've ended up on the mountain top to begin with, and even if what we've done continues to haunt us in our dreams.

I've just started reading Salvador Placencia's The People of Paper, a novel that's being promoted as "magic realism" though it seems more like "mythic realism" to me with its story of an adult bedwetter yearning to free himself from the pain in his heart and his young daughter who eats limes whenever she can. I'm only 40 pages into it and already there is regret, for that is the one constant on this crazy journey, I guess. I suppose some people never feel regret. Some people are sociopaths who feel nothing for anyone but themselves. Others are so hardened against regret they feel nothing at all. Some people are so overwhelmed by their regret they destroy themselves because that's the only way they can rid themselves of it. I think most of us worry about the shards of glass we leave around us.

I wonder if it is regret that makes us feel more tired as we grow older, and why we sleep less. There is so much more to rework in our minds in those early morning hours, actions and conversations and emails to rewrite after the fact, impossible as that is.

When I read Zach's post about regret I thought about one of Thich Nhat Hanh's lectures on time, about how the present is made of the past just as the future is made of the present. He lectured that the past can be corrected by the present moment, which I took to mean that our actions today can make up for what we've done in the past. If we pay attention to the present moment, Hanh argues, we not only take care of today but also yesterday and tomorrow. I wonder if that is the way to work regret out of our dreams, to get off the mountain top for good.

Sound is like water. It will seep through any opening and find its way into a room unless it's stopped or "decoupled". This is why when they replace my ceiling they have to seal the edges with soft, plyable caulk, and why the walls and the ceiling can't touch. If they do, the sound will simply travel through the walls and enter into the room, no matter how many sound clips they've used to separate the ceiling from the joists. It's a delicate job, this soundproofing. If it's not done correctly the entire enterprise will fail.

I feel like that painful experience, the one that went from blog to email to regret so quickly, was like sound traveling through a floor and hitting the joists then the ceiling and the walls. It seeped through and affected not just my relationship with S but also my relationship with my mother, and when she and I had our argument over it all last Sunday (which we made up quickly because we can actually see each other, unlike the days of emails it took with S since we haven't seen each other in months, again), I desperately wanted to be alone and away from everything. I had this overwhelming desire to flee and be quiet, but since my house has been far from peaceful the past four months, I felt like I had nowhere to go. I went to the zen temple for their afternoon service, something I hadn't done for over a year. It's more of a 'beginners' service, with chairs instead of cushions and a question and answer session afterwards instead of a lecture. It's already dark at 4 now, especially when the sky is muffled with cloud cover as it was last weekend. I went up to the main room and it was cold and lightless and the cushions were still out from the morning service. There was only one other person there, a woman seated on a cushion in the back. I sat on one of the cushions across from her and after about ten minutes I realized that there would be no service at all. The woman left and I sat there in the dark and the cold and the quiet and I meditated for about a half hour, then I got up and walked around the room in an attempt at walking meditation, following the contours of the room around the cushions and the chairs and in front of the giant gold Buddha statues. When I worked around the room twice, I stopped in the back and did three prostrations, perhaps because I felt like I had to do some kind of penance, or perhaps because I needed to do more than sit and walk. After the three prostrations I left, the room still dark, still cold, still quiet.

I know we can't escape what we've done. We can't flee regret. But maybe Hanh is right, and the pilot in the story too. Maybe we can correct our own mistakes and therefore change the past, and the future, for the better.