“I am not a fast thinker. I write, slowly, to know what I think” -Gregory Maguire
It is a new year and many things have shifted. They have shifted slowly and without my permission. The first week of the new year a good friend called me and told me her news. Outside the sun shown through whispers of clouds that should have been heavy with rain. An errant hummingbird buzzed hungrily in our flowerless backyard. And the succulents turned to the sun. I said “Things are changing”. Forgive my attempt at description. I’ve been reading a lot of Murakami. If I was Murakami, right now I would actually turn into that hummingbird and then marry a cat who lived in a tunnel next to the sewer.
I can see clearly through the San Francisco winter sky that things are changing. Whether I like it or not the axis of my world is tilting and migrating in another direction. And this change is asking me, clearly, to let go of the past and to make room for the present. I always knew that growing up would be scary. I just never knew that it would require a daily delivery of courage on some scratched plastic platter. This present moment that I am staring at looks full of possibility and chance. But I only get to step into it if I am willing to make my own way in the world and let go of the old ways of me and my crazy ancestors. The big challenge lies in my willingness to let impermanence happen and to let things move forward. I have never been good at this. But over the holidays something shifted and changed for me.
I was very unhappy over the holidays. I felt very sad, like many or most people. I was heavy with history and hopes. I spent a lot of time staring into the distance. I felt like I was in some Victorian soap opera of love and loss, without the corset. But each act of suffering is a chance to get comfortable with this inevitable part of life. And to get better (maybe) at dealing with it. And out of this time came a new willingness and understanding that I didn’t have before.
As a nurse working with people who are very sick, I often question my motives and understanding of what I do. I have spent the last 18 months trying to understand how people do this job. When I walk in a room I see people who are very much like me. They may look different. They may be richer or poorer. They may be younger or older. But ultimately, they are human and they are exactly like me. I do not see a great chasm between my apparent health and their apparent illness. Many people who work with this population have to make it an “us/them” situation because it is the only way to show up at work. I can’t seem to do that, but I understand people who do. Recently I was listening to Carolyn Myss speak about illness. She is a well-known healer and teacher in the world of energy medicine and I was surprised to hear her anger and disgust at the way people approach illness. She said this: the first thing people think when they get a horrible illness is “WHY ME?” Their massive ego, natural need for distinction, and fundamental entitlement leads them to struggle with this question. The better question, the more humbling question, is why NOT me? What, exactly, is so special about me as a human being that means I shouldn’t get sick?
When I heard this angry lady share I was shocked. I stopped my walk along the sidewalk. This lady was so angry and talked with such force it was hard to listen. She reminded me of Kali, the goddess of scary shit who is meant to rip away our illusion. I realized that although I have yet to struggle with a horrible illness, I ask this question all the time. I sit in my meetings, with my journal, and in my sadness asking this question: Why Me? Why was I born this way? Why did these sad and lonely and sometimes horrible things have to happen to me? Why did I have to go through this? Why am I still going through this? And it occurred to me (in the way only insight can) with a slap across the face that this was my ego, this was my entitlement, this was my superiority that led me to ask this. The better question is why not me?
And really, why not me? What is so incredibly special about me that I shouldn’t have suffered the particular difficulties of my little life? Nothing. Staying in the “why me” of my life means that my ego gets to pretend to untangle some fundamental flaw that I have. I get to spend all these hours trying to piece together why these things have happened to me. Why I have spent years smoking and eating and drinking and running to get away. And by staying in this all I do is smoke and eat and drink and run. Nothing changes. There is no growth in this question except the infernal spinning into the center of a story that is no longer real.
Asking “why not me” means that I am free. The pain and hurt of life is just something that happens. It is just something that happened. Asking why me affirms the arrogant belief that life should somehow not be painful. Life is painful. It is also joyous and beautiful. But it is painful. Horrible things happen and my unwillingness to accept that makes only one more victim in the big parade of pain.
In the last hours I have had the chance to practice this again. The superficiality of conflict and hurt set me right down in my old ways. Why ME? I cried. Why is this happening again? Maybe I’m getting smarter. Maybe my neurons are starting to fire faster. Because pretty quickly I got to why not me. And that ended it. With that I got to move into more space and honesty. I got to have compassion for the hurt I feel without making it a big story or adding to the hurt by lashing out. I got free. And it is this freedom that creates more space for me to move forward into a new part of my life. I don’t know what will come of it. Things are changing. You never know. Maybe I will end up talking to that tunnel cat or learn to fly with that hummingbird. Or maybe I will just wake up everyday, mind my business, and get some business of my own to mind.
