Today began innocently enough in the garden, the place where things have gone badly for men and women since the beginning. There’s a snake in this one, too, which was probably here first. A passing thunderstorm has refreshed the landscape with a painterly sheen. My wife and I gather after-storm pine boughs and twigs littering our flower garden. The fifty-foot white pine still presides over our backyard. Beyond, there’s a barn, a pond, and rough grass and wildflowers.

It’s an unlikely setting for an argument that starts about one thing, slips under your skin, and erupts as something else entirely. When it happens, we settle things like most loving couples do—we turn on each other.

The point of contention is which of us is the older soul, though the real injury, as usual, is pride. According to Donna, I’m a new soul, clumsily navigating my first time around. I gather this makes me spiritually stunted. Donna concedes I’m bright but compromised by my freshman status in the universe.

“And on whose authority do you claim you’re an old soul?” I ask. “I mean, who made you Registrar of Old Souls?”

“It has to do with wisdom, inner peace, the power of tranquility. That sort of thing,” she says.

“As compared to whom?” I ask.

Donna names Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and several other departed titans of humanity as old souls. It’s tough being married to someone whose soul rubs elbows with the saints. But what galls me is that she considers several crones in her book group as old souls, but not me.

“How many times do you think I’ve been around?” I ask.

“The fact that you’re turning spiritual understanding and wisdom into a competition speaks for itself. You’re an even newer soul than I thought! Jealous because you didn’t make my old-souls list!” Donna snaps her cutting shears menacingly, then picks through the survivors for a meager bouquet of peonies.

“So, how many times has your soul been here? On Earth, in general,” I ask.

“Who’s counting? But since you ask, I think I’ve been around several times. I tolerate your nonsense. That takes patience. And the deal breaker for you, as far as any circle of wisdom is concerned, is your anger. It’s your default position, a no-win, no-wisdom position. You need to straighten that out this time around. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”

She really knows how to piss me off. If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. It’s supposed to be a rhetorical question, but I see beyond the binary.

“Why not right and happy?” I ask. After she expels a dramatic sigh, I continue, “I mean, that’s pretty much your state of being. Why shouldn’t it be mine? You might step back, self-reflect, and consider the possibility.”

After another heartfelt sigh, she turns her back and works the soil. Pushing her buttons is only temporarily satisfying. Not making her old-souls team galls me—not because I believe in reincarnation exactly, but because I want credit for having clawed my way toward something like wisdom.

Born far away, a stranger in a strange land wherever I went, yellow on the outside, white on the inside, a so-called banana, I’ve twelve-stepped my way into sobriety, howled through years of psychotherapy, cobbled together a decent résumé, and given time and money to good causes. Sounds like the profile of a soul back for a third or fourth helping, don’t you think? Also, I’m the one who’s read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

I acknowledge I’ve got anger issues. They usually work against me. In the aftermath of anger, I become the remorseful beast clomping down to my own personal slaughterhouse of pride. Or something like that.

What offends me most is not Donna’s metaphysics but her ranking system, because I have mistaken progress for transcendence, and survival for serenity. Still, all things considered, I’ve listened to Donna when it counts. On impulse, I resist and disagree, then usually come around to her point of view. Consider the Zen master who says a snowflake never falls in the wrong place. I prefer to see intentionality in what some say is a random universe, governed by chaos.

I drag a broken branch to the barn and look back at the garden. The birds and insects are busy. Donna is all hat, hands, and knees, as if in supplication, praise, or both. The sun and clouds preside over our industry. This is the Here and Now my first time around—and most likely, my last.