la ira

I am tired. Really tired.  I am working full time and also going to school full time.  This means that I have time for absolutely nothing.  This also means that all my peaceful, meditating intentions have flown out the window.  I’ve held it down, generally.  Kept my cool, kept it together.  But being tired means that things start slipping and then that slipping can lead to sloppiness.  And for me emotional sloppiness is all about one thing: anger. Stuff I haven’t felt in years.

The great effort of the last 11 years of my life has been to turn my anger into something softer, calmer, kinder.  It has been to take all the reasons I was so angry and feel them so they weren’t in charge anymore.  And I have done a really good job of that.   I have learned that peace and quiet isn’t terrifying.  I have learned that anger does nothing to protect your soul.  I have learned that life is more than just a fight.

But this last week a few things happened that inflamed me.  They literally engulfed me in flames.  I was laying in bed and I couldn’t even breath I was so angry.  I started to pray and for some reason pictured Thich Nhat Hanh.  This is the monk who taught me everything I know about anger, its dangers and how to be free of it.  And in the center of this anger explosion, it was his face and his presence that I prayed to.  But it didn’t work.  I had to get up and pace.  Get up and take benadryl.  Get up and brush my teeth.  And then finally scream and scream until I cried.  Yes. It was that wonderful.

Of course, I took this as an opportunity to beat myself up.  Aren’t I more evolved? Aren’t I free of this? Aren’t I calmer?  And the answer is no.  In life you get it all.  You get peace and anger in the same life, the same year, the same week.  And sometimes, when it’s bad, the same breath.  Sometime I feel like my real work might just be to take whatever comes up and feel it.  Feel it without telling a story about it.  Feel it without fixing it or changing it.  Just feel it.  Whatever it might be.  Whether it happens once a year, once a lifetime, or once an hour.  Maybe it’s about letting feelings mix without forcing labels on them.  Letting them all exist, in the same person and the same heart, without restrictions.

This made me think about this patient that I recently met.  They have a long, complicated history and not the best future.  During the good, old 1 am heart-to-heart, this patient said to me “I’ve been through so much no? Sometimes I wonder why.  But the thing is this: I want to live.  I want to live because life is so beautiful”.   I walked out that morning and couldn’t get this out of my mind: this little, frail, sick person who is suffering the ravages of this disease looking at me through a breaking fever with so much passion for life. They were literally glowing from the inside.  It was undeniable.   I have never seen someone more alive.  Someone so alive in the midst of death.  I am not a fortune teller and I don’t know what this patient’s story will be or how it will be written, but death lurks around them.  And even with this, even with one of the longest, hardest stories I’ve known, this person is burning with life.  Because it isn’t simple.  We are not just alive or dead.  We are both.  Everyday we live, we get closer to our eventual death.  Every time we choose to numb out and not be alive, we are further from the life force that breathes through us regardless of whether we want to be here or not.

So it is this complex.  Life and death are webbed together.  Anger and peace exist in the same moment.  Maybe in the anger of this last week, I can still be peaceful or at least try my best not to harm others.  Maybe in this patient’s death, they can still live fiercely and beautifully.  Maybe there is just really, honestly, truly nothing that is black or white.

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