Diary fragments related to this illness experience

I’ve lived in some misery for over a year: months of nerve pain followed by spinal surgery; total knee replacement followed by all-too-slow healing; emergency admission with urinary tract infection/sepsis followed by (now) six weeks of lethargy, sleeplessness, weight loss, night sweats, and memory lapses. Throughout, my mood’s remained up but, more recently, as test after test points to “something not right with your white blood cells,” a sense of doom (will this ever end?) and discouragement (what, no pill to fix this?) has descended like a wet blanket.  

You sit there for days saying, “This is a strange business.” You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.” (Rumi)

Zen wisdom points to “don’t-know-practice” as a way to cope. “Welcome everything. Push away nothing” I hear my teacher say. Sit, walk, lie still: notice your breath, one at a time, nothing special. Direct your awareness from woe to the freshness of Now: to this tiny moment where everything just is, freeing you from clinging to wishful thoughts. To be frank, I’ve found it near impossible to focus on this ‘space in between’ while everything’s gone upside down.

Think of anxiety as the “the fruit of unanswered questions … [of] being afraid to ask the right questions— because they might turn out to have no answer.” (Thomas Merton)

Circles within circles make me dizzy: push away nothing and let go of preferences. Ask the right question and find that there’s no answer. Complaining to my friend Arnie, he writes, “This room of not-knowing sounds like a grey and sunless room, though I do understand that it is an attempt to live beyond the stories of the mind that get going when our life is threatened. Why not let a few sunbeams in, knowing that they too are but stories? . . . Maybe use not-knowing only when it’s working for you, knowing that in itself it is its own kind of story.”

Now is the time of dark invitation. / Beyond frontiers you did not expect; / Abruptly your old life seems distant. …

When the reverberations of shock subside in you, / May grace come to restore your balance. / May it shape a new space in your heart /

To embrace this illness as a teacher / Who has come to open your life to new worlds.

(John O’Donohue)

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Recalling Arnie’s wish “that something good happens to you today”, I roll off the bed, reach for cap and scarf, schlepp outside . . . and give the little front lawn its first trim for this new year. Phew! 

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Barks, Coleman (translator). (1997). The Illuminated Rumi, p. 17. Merton, Thomas. (1955). No Man is an Island, p. xiii. O’Donohue, John. (2008). Excerpts from “For a friend on the arrival of illness” in To Bless the Space Between Us, p. 60.