Zen in the Face of Meh.

Meh.

Anger is easier than grief.
Action is easier than waiting.
Doing is easier than being.

The last few months have been a bit like emotional whack a mole around here—just when our heads come up above the earth after some loss or trial, WHACK! things happen and we are back underground, holding our heads and thinking well, THAT was ill-advised.

Over the last year I have worked hard to build habits of self-care. Not pedicures and bubble baths (um, no, don’t touch my feet), I mean taking time to set my foundation each morning…morning prayer, reading a chapter of a book that makes me think (right now that is New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton—blowing my mind), exercise &/or yoga, THEN starting the doing/action part of the day. My hope has been that these grounding, foundational moments to start the day will help me steer my mercurial self through the REST of the day.

Honestly, and to my surprise, they really have.

But in seasons of EWaM (Emotional Whack-a-Mole), these things are a work. A WORK.  In the parlance of Simon & Garfunkel, my mind’s distracted and confused/my thoughts are many miles away.  I have to keep re-focusing during my brief morning routine as I find myself staring off at the willows in my yard. I got on the yoga mat this morning and today’s practice in the 14 day challenge I am doing was a restorative breathing/meditation/stretch practice. About three minutes in, I had to spazz and BLAGH out loud for a minute and then refocus. I DID NOT WANT TO RESTORATIVE BREATHE. I WANT TO WARRIOR AND BALANCE AND FOCUS MY HURT AND ANGER AND EVERYTHING ON SOME UNFORTUNATE DRISHTI! (the thing you stare at so you don’t fall over in balance postures).  I NEED FRENETIC ACTION!!

Ultimately, I am glad I did the breathing thing, after my initial ugh.  I need to learn how to be, to wait, even when it is painful. I can’t hide from emotion by moving rocks…although I do love some landscape therapy.

Doing is easier than being.

I am trying to learn how to lean into the grief, the powerlessness, the ugh of hurting for friends. Granted, I am a slow, slow learner, and my learnings are mostly fueled by my Cadbury stash and the chocolate ice cream I bought for Dave.  The work of re-focusing and re-focusing over and over on just being, on sending love from afar, of gratitude for the friends rallying to pray for miracles…it is a wearying work. But I am grateful to have friends to hurt for, if that makes sense.

Here would be a great place for the “And So I Have Learned and Solved this By….” Moment.

Sigh. A great place.

But I have not yet solved the weariness of the work.

 I do understand now how gratitude is central to everything. Every. Thing. I am so grateful for the little annoyances in my day. I am so grateful that one of my children tends to follow me around. I am so grateful that this fall we are not starting each week with chemo. I am so grateful that I have a house to be a perpetual mess. Gratitude has become the rope that helps me find the anchor of hope.

So even on a day of abundant MEH, I am grateful and hoping, even if I’m frustrated and now a little queasy from eating too much chocolate.  I guess really, finding Zen is more about the process—it is not an endpoint or destination, just how we can navigate life in peace—even in the midst of storms.

I am determined to learn this. May need to stock up on more  Cadbury…

Stuck on the Shoulder

Life can never be exactly what you want it to be—
I could be satisfied, Knowing you love me…
(This is dedicated to the one I love)

I’ve reached epic fail on the blogging front.

For both of you who read here, I apologize. Not because I have some deluded sense of Sin of Word Deprivation, but because I’m a creature of habit who obsessively checks several blogs regularly. I know that twinge of disappointment when there are no new words to be read.

I’ve hesitated to post this. Nobody wants to read Confessions of a Waaaambulance Rider, and I feel like the descent into whine is never more than a step away. But I hope that by at least putting some words on screen I can take some kind of step, even if it’s a slippery one.

When I began this blog, I called it “Moving Right Along”. As a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, my life tends to hurtle forward, kind of like Daffy Duck in the Robin Hood episode…

“ I trip along merrily! I trip along merrily! I trip I trip I trip I trip I tri-hip up and down! I trip trip trip trip (falls down hill)…trippity trip trippity…I tri-hip it up and down!” .

Well, that, and I like Muppets. Inordinately.

But recently, for whatever reason, I am not going anywhere.

I’m still busy as all get out. School has been a challenge: a good challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. My teenager defines Challenge, generally not in a good way. My little ones…well, one isn’t so little anymore, and she’s trying to make sense of growing up. My baby is my heart, a balm to my soul (albeit one that can NEVER find her socks or her ballet tights and forgets herself in a game or movie when I send her to do a chore). Everyone has activities, everyone has projects, everyone has needs and wants and the washer is broken and my spouse’s running clothes REEK and I have no clue what to make for dinner.

In that respect, life is moving right along just like it always does.
But somehow, lost in the late summer, my heart is stuck, my mind is frozen. Well, frozen in the sense that there are 57 million ice cubes racing around inside the frozen brain and yelling at any given second. This is most annoying at 5 a.m., but it gets old at any time of day.

I can go into a store, and see something that puts me right back in 2004. Yesterday it was those crazy erasers, the little Japanese collectible erasers my girls are nuts for. I saw a sushi set…and instantly was back in the onco playroom, where the play kitchen set had a somewhat disturbing plastic sushi play food collection. Today it was a song on the radio, more accurately a conversation about radio songs that meant something, followed by the thought of the song that was playing when we headed to Philly for biopsy results in 2006. It’s like my mental TARDIS is broken (not unlike the actual TARDIS often is, which I guess should be comforting).

It’s like the crazy vines in the movie Jumanji, or Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. The vines catch my ankle and drag me down…and darn, they just keep
growing.

Many of our long time friends in our community of woe are really suffering. Many are reaching that point in the journey that is the nightmare of every parent, but an acute agony for the parents who walk this long road too. Every child suffering, every parent suffering, is another tendril that holds my heart from moving.

Why, after 6 years, this is such an issue, I have no idea. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Last night I saw a quote on Facebook that said, “Anxiety is the crippling fear over some possible future evil. The irony is that, except for sin, anxiety is a greater evil than any evil that could possibly come upon us -- for anxiety disquiets the entire soul and renders it unfit for any good work.


While I don’t know that anxiety is a greater evil than any ACTUAL evil –about 10 minutes in a pediatric intensive care unit with your child kind of puts the doubt on that—I do see that the disquiet of anxiety, the noise, the 57 million ice cubes, can get a gal stuck. The noise makes all other words, all other blog entries, just seem meaningless.

I am waiting and hoping that the poster of that quote posts the “and so you do this and live happily ever after” follow up quote…

And waiting…and hoping…and waiting…and hoping…

But in the meantime, I am trying to make sense of things, trying to embrace once again that life really can never be exactly what I want it to be, but love truly makes things bearable, if not better.

Hopefully as we get into Thanksgiving I can get some of my verbal and mental mojo back. I don’t really know how, but as a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, I really don’t have the time to be caught in some mental game of Chutes and Ladders, where every step forward leads to a big twisty slide down to yikes.

Really, NOBODY has time to be “merely a flesh wound!” everywhere she goes.

I’m not sure how to do this; but I hope that I can start moving right along again, that I can formulate coherent sentences and get the washer fixed. Until then, I’m going to see how many more movies I can reference in a single blog entry… : )