April 22, 2022
Musings on pain and illness, aging, and letting things take their course.
I’ve been immersed in ideas about getting older as I’ve been preparing for a course I’m teaching on Conscious Aging. I’m noticing what it brings up - denial (about what’s happening), fear (of what may or will happen), at the very least some resistance to shifting roles.
Pauli’s back started acting up, 3 years post-surgery. And when the pain heightened and became debilitating, I lost centeredness, big time. She was uncharacteristically harsh and impatient when I was trying to help. I took it personally and insecurities leapt to the surface - about being slow, self-absorbed, how much of my day it takes me to do half of what Pauli does, and about other people in Pauli’s life being better caregivers. I unconsciously conjured up scenarios where I was being criticized and judged and had to remind myself that it was just me, making up stories.
As much as I wish I could face all of life’s difficulties with acceptance, being aware of my resistance or my own lack of equanimity almost always results in me having more compassion and understanding for others in the same boat. It’s the silver lining of being unmindful :).
I was listening to Krista Tippet’s interview with children’s author Kate DiCamillo and they were talking about Charlotte’s Web and how much truth-telling children could handle in books. Kate made the beautiful observation that E.B. White’s gift was that he knew how to tell the truth to children, and he knew how to make the truth bearable. Kate shared this passage where Charlotte reassures Wilbur before her death:
“These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world…Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days…”
This is what mindfulness does for me, it tells the truth about life, but somehow makes it bearable.
In preparation for this Conscious Aging class, I reread Eckhart Tolle’s writings on the expansion and contraction of the universe and everything in it. This is reflected in our heart beats, waking in the morning and falling into sleep at night, the in and out of one breath. Having successes, having failures, growing up and becoming old (if we’re lucky), and birth and death. And so, I am reminded that whatever life brings is ‘the way of it’ and I need to practice so that I don’t make it into a problem. Pigs can be saved from the slaughterhouse, but it’s in the nature of things for spiders to die after they lay their eggs. In our culture we are all about the expanding, the growth. We don’t much acknowledge or even sometimes allow the contracting, or even the resting necessary for rejuvenation. If we have failed, we wonder how to turn it into success. We don’t want to talk about being sick, only getting better. We push through, rather than allow things to be as they are, or for us to feel as we do.
I notice too, the energy of spring and things shifting, not because of will or striving but just of their own accord. I find myself one morning, not lighting a candle and crawling back into bed to write, but instead putting on my coat and wiping off the deck chair to scribble outside with the birds and their songs. I spontaneously change the images on my website without having to have it on my to-do list for weeks. Our friend’s 15-year-old, (who seems to be languishing on the couch in a never-ending video game), just announced one day at breakfast that he wanted a job at the local grocery store and surprised everyone by going out and getting one. The pansies show up outside the convenience store, the yards are dotted with daffodils.
Enjoy the spring, the earth waking up and expanding into green. Simultaneously, we exhale, we sleep, experience pain, and some of us return home and go back to where we came from.
