Imbalance

Perhaps, if you’ve read the two recent postings on this blog, you’ve wondered why I seem to be examining my life so minutely. The answer I think lies in the major back surgery I underwent in mid-March. During my time in the hospital rehab unit, I had an Easter experience.

For four days I was unable to eat anything. The nurses encouraged me to at least eat applesauce, but I simply couldn’t swallow. The fifth day—a Monday—went awry. My blood pressure fluctuated disturbingly. I fainted and was out for some time. I could answer only “Anna Dolores Ready” to all the questions the nurses asked while trying to revive me. Repeatedly I vomited. My spirits plummeted, imprisoned in a gray cloud. I dwelt in a miasma of nothingness.

In late afternoon, my eldest niece visited after work. Seeing me pitch forward and nearly fall, then faint, then throw up, she stayed several hours. She asked the nurse to monitor me closely during the night; the nurse assured her I would be well taken care of.

Needing to feed her cat and dogs, my niece kissed my left cheek and reluctantly left. As she passed through the doorway, I thought, “I’ll never see her again.”

The nurse turned off the light. I lay on my right side and began to talk inwardly to all those who had already entered Life beyond the reality I knew—all those who had raised me, taught me, befriended me. They and I dwelt in Oneness.

Trusting their infinite love for me, I said something like “I’m scared that I’m going to die. If living is for my good and the good of the Universe, then I trust you will wake me in the morning. If not, then I embrace death. Not my will, but the will of Oneness be done.”

I began reciting names: Mom, Dad, Jan, John, Jim . . . name after name after name of those who have touched my life with goodness.

Several times during the night I woke, still feeling lost within myself, still praying to Oneness to keep me in this life or to welcome me to the path of Light. More names: Florence, Al, Mary, Annette, Nicole, Mary Alice.

I slept again. When next I woke, I thought of all the cats who'd blessed my life: Dulcy, Bartleby, Tybalt, Noah, Jeremiah, Eliza Doolittle, Laz, Raissa. I called on each to be with me.

Once more I slept, then woke again and invoked name after name after name of those for whom I felt deep and abiding gratitude. The names passed like ticker-tape through my heart: Miriam, Robert, Andrew, Lon, Scholastica, Dunstan.

The next morning, I awoke to sunlight. I was alive.

Two days later I came home.

Now what does this have to do with the introspection evident in this posting and the last two?

Since that March morning, I’ve found myself feeling not only physically, but emotionally, imbalanced. The doctor tells me that this is a common response of patients who have serious spinal surgery or whose chest has been cracked open for open-heart surgery. I, myself, think that the possibility of saying good-bye to life as we know it can accompany any major surgery. 

I am alive, yet I find myself reevaluating my whole life.

Perhaps the anesthesia has something to do with this. Perhaps my age. Perhaps the weariness resulting from the months of pain before the operation. Perhaps all of that.

And perhaps what I’m experiencing is the opportunity to truly let go of the past and embrace something new in my life. Time will tell.

Peace.

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.