I miss Herbert Robertson. He was my neighbor. I don’t talk much with my other neighbors: the alcoholic man and his fat wife across the street. Or the reborn Christians next to them. The young couple I never see, even though they live so close I can hear them cough at night. The divorced bachelors who sit every summer night on their front porch in cracked vinyl easy chairs with the filling popping out the sides, drinking beer and smoking until after dark, the lit ends of their cigarettes like fireflies.

My mother told me that as a child I would occasionally steal into my older brother’s room and vandalize some architectural project he had spent weeks working on in his uncommonly meticulous fashion.

It was hard taking my father to the public pool. It had wheelchair access, but he wasn’t in a wheelchair yet. Still, the ramp made it easier for him to shuffle up to the building and into the locker room, where he would sit and let me undress him.

I’d been melancholy for weeks, dogged by feelings I couldn’t name. Then my wife went out of town; I didn’t want her to go.

You might say I was ready for a good cry. Yet how tempting to ignore sorrow, as if it were a beggar. Those dark, accusing eyes.

Compassionate self-care is a path of kindness and respect for ourselves. It offers a way of relating to our internal experience which is not pushed, coerced, or manipulated. In this path there are no categorical labels, no demands, no success or failure. There isn’t anything to achieve, get to, or make. No ideal state of consciousness is proposed which is any better than the one we find ourselves in right now. We allow ourselves to feel just what we are feeling, to breathe consciously, and to stay attentive to the body. We don’t let ourselves become confused by thoughts which suggest to us what our feelings mean.