Obeying Pain

Juggling eggs while galloping on a Kentucky Derby winner is what a lot of this year has felt like for me.  I don’t wish things were different, but it sure is surreal.  There are times when the thought of a brief vacation is very appealing.

So when the winter’s firewood arrived, instead of asking our fabulous handyman Jim to stack it as he has in the past, I decided to satisfy my yearning for a concrete, repetitive physical task where mindless was its chief reward.  

I hadn’t been at it five minutes before misery erupted.  Clearly, in my haste to luxuriate in a brief respite from the mandates of my beloved’s wrestling match with depression, I had overlooked one of life’s basic lessons.

We can give our mind a holiday from focusing on this or that outside ourselves, but never are we free from choosing where we place our attention.  Even no choice is a choice.

Without adult supervision––i.e., the guidance of our heart––our mind easily wanders into the quicksand of resentment, unforgiveness, and their many toxic relatives.  Thoughts the like of, “I can’t believe I didn’t say something when that girl was being harassed in high school!”  Or, “I see no good answer to how my beloved would be cared for it I were to die now.”  How easily we allow ghosts through the ages to haunt us, distracting us from the sacredness of now.

The abrupt pang sparked a memory of something from Marcel Proust I’d long ago scribbled in my quote book: To goodness and wisdom we make only promises; pain we obey.

Thus motivated to reorient my focus, it took but a few seconds to see the gift that lay at my feet: five cords of firewood, ten tons plus.

Every piece as I touched it became an opening to imagine its life.  Where it had been born.  How old it was.  Its seasons of being shaped by the whims of nature.  (Hurricane Irene, for instance, just seven falls ago, ravaging countless trees per acre.)  What animals had been sheltered by it?  What human drama had it observed, and even been part of?  If sugar maple, how many taps has it known, how many lives has it sweetened?  Perhaps it had been planted to mark the grave of a child a century ago.  Maybe on one of its limbs for years a craggily old hunter like Jim hung his deer for butchering.  

And today, how privileged I was to play a role in its next transition.  How thankful to be reminded that everyone and everything is always in transition.  

I was and am warmed with gratitude for its helping my beloved and me survive the coming winter––a winter that, because our first with depression, is sure to be unlike any we have ever before experienced.  

No doubt to include some egg juggling while galloping through the snow.