Detaching from Outcomes

During the past twenty-five years, I’ve experienced a range of ailments from minor to major. Probably all of you have too. For myself, my life went merrily on during the first fourteen years of that span. Then Meniere’s Disease demanded entry in May 2006.

Meniere’s, one moment I would be standing upright. The next nanosecond, with no warning, I’d be sprawled on the kitchen floor, with the walls and ceiling spinning round me. I never knew when I’d fall or when the room would start to spin. For nearly a year, I seldom left the house. Mostly I crawled from room to room.

        After an operation on the sac behind the mastoid bone of my left ear, the episodes subsided. I recuperated, but neglected to consider what my body was trying so desperately to teach me. I didn’t explore what I could learn from Meniere’s.

       After recuperating from the operation, I once again began producing hour-by-hour schedules, demanding that I write so much each day, exercise so much, complete a certain number of odd jobs around the house each day.

     The result? Ten more years of ill-health that culminated in a seriously major operation on my back in March of this year.

The time has come for me to examine what my body and the Universe are trying to teach me. To do that I must wander back to what’s been said to me and what’s happened in these last twenty-five years.

     I remember telling a friend that I just couldn’t figure out how to get an agent to represent my writing. Judy said, “Go with the flow. You try to control too much.”

     Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what going “with the flow” meant. Surely I had to plan. No agent in New York would be muttering, “I need a new client. I’ll stick a straight pin in this map of the United States and that’s where I’ll start searching!” And there I’d be, pinned smack dab in Stillwater, Minnesota!

      I didn’t listen to Judy, but continued to plan and to envision the outcomes of all my planning. In fact, I became totally attached to those outcomes: an agent would be delighted with my writing; I’d be published to rave reviews; the first book would sell 50,000 copies, make $100,000, and enable me to build a four-season porch on the house; an editor would ask for another and then another manuscript to publish; I’d become both rich and famous. (Yes, I admit to that dream, wanting to be famous enough that readers would eagerly await my next book.)

      Several years after Judy’s remark—the one I ignored—I read an article in which the author encouraged readers to dream big, but to resist becoming attached to outcomes. She said that the Universe had much more to give us than our paltry desires.

      She, too, spoke of going with the flow; of entering my dream river and floating downstream to wherever it took me. I liked this image; it spoke to me.

      Here’s the summing up: I’m hoping that while I rest and nap and sleep during these months of recuperation, I will also let go of outcomes and simply embrace what my life is right now. I’m blogging, and that, as a number of you reminded me in your comments last week, is a way of being published.

      I’m also hoping that from all this musing, I’ll learn something truly new. I have no idea what. I only know that I can feel the cracks opening within me—the cracks through which the light will shine through as Leonard Cohen wrote.

      Peace.

A Need to Control

The past few years of my life can be summed up with an old Yiddish expression: “Man plans. God laughs.” For the past thirty-five years, I think God has been guffawing at my detailed plans for writing and getting published.

I’d like to explore that with you in this post and several that will follow. This is a big issue in my life—one that I’m grappling with since I had serious major back surgery in March. Health issues have accompanied me for many years, and I’m wondering if they are an indicator of what’s amiss with my life.

Let’s begin with a confession: I’ve always been a planner. That is to say, I’ve always tried to control the events of my life. I make schedules, routines, regimes—all those things that indicate doing this before that and getting this done today and that tomorrow.

All my long life, I have been a person who gave herself deadlines. By such and such a time, a day, a month, a year I will have accomplished this or that—mostly with regard to writing. That was necessary when I worked as an editor and had projects with deadlines that had to be met for publication purposes. But those deadlines are no more.

Now there are self-imposed deadlines that encompass my whole day: Walking. (How far? How often? Which route?) Doing core exercises. (Three or five times a week? All or just a few of the twelve the doctor gave me? Morning or afternoon?) Polishing a convent memoir I want to self-publish. (A chapter a day? Add more incidents? Explain more? Learn to use social media? Read books about marketing? And by when do I need to know everything? What kind of research regime do I need to establish?)

When I took the Myers-Briggs Inventory way back in the 1980s, my chart showed I was strongly intuitive, that details flummoxed me. But as the years have passed, I seem to rely much more on details. Details piled on details. I’ve lost—or misplaced—my trusty intuition.

No one, except myself, is standing over me wearing a hardhat, wielding a clipboard, and checking off the detailed items I accomplish each day. I have become my own taskmaster. And my thoughts don’t leap—intuitive-wise—to the next step: I need to have it writing done, planned.

With regard to writing I am struggling with throwing in the proverbial towel. I’ve been boxing my own shadows for the last thirty-five years.

I have planned and planned for how to get published and yet little has happened. My trying to control the outcome of my writing—and there has been only one acceptable outcome—being published—has resulted only in frustration.

Something is amiss. If I am meant to be published, then why—if I do the work—doesn’t that happen?

All my plans have led to disappointment. And it’s really sad that I’m unable to appreciate just being able to write.

So what is the answer?

I think it’s letting go. Going with the flow. Surrendering.

Next week I’ll share with you where I am with that.

Note that I’m “planning” to post again next Sunday. You see, I just can’t stop planning and scheduling. I’m steeped in a lifetime of control.

I wish you peace, pressed down and overflowing. I wish the same for myself.

CTCL Encourages Going with the Flow

Two weeks ago I posted my plan for all that I would do this year. In last week’s posting, I admitted throwing in the towel on that plan, deciding “to go with the flow” of my life, and letting go of trying to control life’s dailiness.

         I gave two reasons for going with the flow: Meniere’s Disease and Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma (CTCL). Last week I wrote about the first; this week I want to explain and explore the ramifications of the second.

         About fifteen years ago, I discovered a pink patch on my arm. A second patch appeared before I saw Dr. Hamilton, my family physician, for my yearly checkup. Noticing it, he said it was psoriasis and prescribed a cream. When it failed to change the patches, I simply forgot about the whole thing.         

         Until Meniere’s arrived in 2006, I seldom paid attention to my body and didn’t even know how to listen to it or what to listen for. And so I mostly ignored what others might call symptoms—aches, pains, patches, rashes, and so on.

         Years passed and in 2011, the patches began to spread—from my arms to my thighs to my lower legs. By now, Meniere’s had made me aware that my body could tell me things. So I made an appointment with a dermatologist. She did two biopsies that indicated I had stage one CTCL.

         She explained that stage three attacked all the inner organs and was fatal. To avoid that, she prescribed a corticosteroid cream and ultraviolent light therapy (phototherapy).

         Beginning in April 2011, I did light therapy for three times a week for nine months. By January 2012, the CTCL was in remission. It stayed in remission nine months. I did more light therapy and it went back into remission and stayed away until January 2014.

         When it reappeared I made an appointment at the clinic. In mid-February the doctor confirmed that the cancer was back and that I needed to begin the phototherapy again.

         So now I am once again using the steroidal cream and having light treatments. Thus far, I have had seven sessions. This will continue until March 27 when I’ll see the doctor again so as to determine if the phototherapy and the cream are working.

         There is a risk that the ultraviolent light will cause other skin cancers, so doing the therapy for nine-months back in 2011 was iffy. This time, we’re hoping that the cancer goes more quickly into remission.

         The wonderful upside of this is that the doctor has told me that no one she’s treated for stage one has ever gone to stage three. So the fact that I’m undergoing treatment is crucial. Also with CTCL, I will most likely keep going in and out of remission for the rest of my life.

         None of this alarms me. If I keep being aware of when pink patches show up and immediately go for treatment, all shall be well.  

         The light treatment is done in an upright cylinder in which there are about forty tall, skinny, vertical, light tubes. I step inside; the nurse turns on the lights; and I stand there nude for a certain amount of time. Right now the time is only one minute and forty-five seconds. I’ll probably work up to three or four minutes, depending on whether my skin burns. That’s already happened once this go-round.

         Taking a shower, slathering sun block on the unaffected skin, driving to the clinic, having the treatment, and driving home takes about two hours. Since I’m out and about I always do an errand or two. So usually on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday CTCL demands three hours of my day.  

         Moreover, because the light treatments tire me out, I always come home and take a long nap. You can see why this and the Meniere’s headaches affect any schedule or routine I might try to devise.

         So now I’m truly getting up each day and doing what my spirit prompts me to do. And—wonder of wonders—I’m feeling content doing that.

         Peace from “Flow Girl.”        

        

Photographs from Wikipedia.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

Just last week I posted the routine to which I was going to commit myself for the remainder of this year. Several of you left comments in which you encouraged me—gently—to be more realistic and not ask too much of myself.

         How wise you are. Already my three-pronged plan has become too ambitious. In less than five weeks, I’ll celebrate my 78^th birthday. And the truth is that I no longer have the energy and resilience I once took for granted.

         Moreover, I deal daily with two physical problems that leave me tired much of the time. Today, I’ll share with you the ramifications of one of them—Ménière’s Disease. Next Thursday I hope to explain the impact of Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma.

         I experienced my first episode of Acute Rotational Vertigo in 2002. Nothing occurred again until 2006 when my Ménière’s became, according to the specialist, progressive and intractable.

         I spent the next eighteen months experiencing ARV episodes—with the walls, ceiling, and floor rotating around me. Nausea and vomiting accompanied each episode. I couldn’t walk without falling and so I crawled from room to room.

         These episodes usually began with me suddenly pitching forward: down the steps, in the rock garden, out of bed, against windowpanes and the sharp corners of tables, toward the pot of boiling spaghetti. The pitch forward, prelude to the episode, came without warning.

         The episodes were of varying length. The longest for me was twenty-four hours. Because of Ménière’s, I couldn’t drive. Read. Watch television. Work at the computer.

         An operation in 2007 made those ARV episodes mostly a thing of the past. However, two weeks ago I experienced ten hours of simple vertigo. Not acute rotational. Just simple. And yet it had me crawling from bed to bathroom to kitchen. Mostly I kept my head on the pillow. Why? Because a boulder had lodged within my skull cavity. When I raised that heaviness off the pillow, I felt as if my head were going to tumble off my shoulders.

         But that occurrence was, I hope, simply a fluke because neither ARV nor simple vertigo happens often anymore. I do have days in which I deal with about five variations of vertigo in ascending order: tentativeness, imbalance, light-headedness, dizziness, wooziness. When I have one of those days, I do little.

         The more problematic side effect of Meniere’s is its headache. In intensity it’s like a migraine, but without light sensitivity. Precipitous barometric changes often trigger these headaches, which can last many hours. They leave me exhausted, as do vertigo episodes and wooziness. I sleep long hours after experiencing them.

         Unfortunately, I live in an area known as “Tornado Alley,” which brings with it many barometric changes. So I have headaches often. In fact, I’ve had a headache everyday for the last sixteen days. During that time, desperate to assure myself that I could get something written this year and find an agent, I wrote last week’s posting. I think that’s called “whistling in the dark”!!!

         But yesterday I read the following words written by the Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön: “Take the whole teatime just to drink your tea.” That line encourages me to live in the present and be within whatever I am experiencing. It encourages me to let go of control.

         Surely, planning schedules for the future is a form of control and yet Ménière’s has tried to teach me again and again that I have control only over the way I respond to life. As you must know by now, I’m a slow learner. Still, I may finally be slogging along the road to reality. I feel myself ready to embrace what one of you suggested: “going with the flow.”

         These are not new words to me. Other friends throughout my life have made the same suggestion. And I try. I do so try. Maybe that’s the result of the asthma with which I was born. Always there is within me a desire to achieve. To leave a mark on life.

         So here’s to going with the flow. I’ll drink—a cup of tea—to that!  

        

PS: If you’d like to know more about Ménière’s, click here. I experienced the four classic symptoms that are listed midway down the article.

Photographs from Wikipedia.