It's My Choice

It's time to concentrate on the things which make me smile.  Without too much effort, I could list a dozen or more things which make me grimace. I wish I didn't have to look beneath them to find the happy places.  I wondered aloud, hobbling up the small step in the garage, the one that tripped G'ma and left me wondering how such a small obstacle could cause such a huge calamity, the one that had both TBG and me stopped in our tracks right then, just for a moment, considering which leg might be better suited for weight bearing, "Why did this have to happen to me?"

I don't go there very often. It's not very useful nor enlightening nor uplifting.  It certainly does not make me smile. But my migraine was still roaring away in the background and my gait was more roiling than rolling and I was tired of it all. The words didn't sound right, hanging there above the cars and my two healthy feet and my husband who loves me and I felt an electric shock up my spine as I channeled Rocky:

Attitude is the ONLY thing you can control.

She was right in front of me, up close and personal in the way that only a friend of four decades can be, and she was annoyed with me.

You have a choice every morning when you wake up.  That's a gift.

We were much younger when I first heard her say these things.  Becoming perforated was not something either of us imagined, but neither were most of the other challenges life threw our way. Still, when I think of the renewal she promises with every morning, I know now in a way I did not then that tomorrow is not promised and that today, by virtue of the fact that I am here to see it, is a good day. Not only the choice, but the day itself is a gift.

Look around you - you don't usually have a choice.

These were words of wisdom offered to her children, a demographic of necessarily limited choices. I wonder if Big Cuter remembers himself at eight, longing to be a grown up, knowing with absolute certainty that "things are so much easier when you're an adult."

I laughed to myself then as I am laughing to myself now. Yes, adulthood brings more choices, but fewer of them are good ones. There are so many constraints, from areas which continue to surprise me.  I never thought that my body would betray me. I did everything I could to insure that. And then I got shot. As she says, you usually don't have a choice.

You can be pissy - you have every right to be - it's your choice.

The fact that everyone agrees that I am allowed to gripe - on occasion - is perfect. I can't wallow (cf. on occasion) but I can move on and annoy someone else with the same whingeing. I can take their sympathy and add it to the pile of Poor Me and be pissy all day, If I choose.

But remember, it's your choice.

And that's what stops me, each and every time. I have control over the most important part of myself; I operate the keyboard. I can play minor chords or bounce along in C Major and it's my choice. I can close my eyes and straighten my hips and shoulders and engage my fourth quadrant and upper magnets and bend my ankle and lift my knee and get up that step and into the house.

Or, I could curl up into a little ball on the unswept floor and cry.

It's my choice.

Was She Only Here for a Visit?

Someone with standing on the issue thinks that she may well have been a short, brief, gift from God.  Bringing joy to a tragic morning, leaving on another sunny day nine years later, was her life meant to be circumscribed by those events?

Was she so full of life because her time was to be so short?  In a crowd of one hundred children, she was the one you noticed.  I've said it so often that I have to stop and remind myself that it is more than a catch phrase.  It's true. There was a lot packed into the body and soul and heart and mind that made up Christina-Taylor Green.  One might almost say it was a full life, condensed, too much to be held in so it burst from her eyes and her arms and enveloped you in the wonder that was her life.

These are hard concepts for me.  I turned my back on formal religion early and definitively. My relationship with a higher being is a private one, one that does not need external rituals.  There's something out there.  I just don't know what it is.

An itinerant pastor, a Cornellian, came to visit me soon after I was shot.  She encouraged me to ask God the questions I was asking her. In the shower the next morning, I cried and wondered why this had happened to us. I felt better afterwards.

It was probably just the tears themselves, a necessary release of the flood that refused to be absorbed and demanded to be set free, although I suppose the framework in which they were set might have had something to do with it.  I've never been quite sure; I've examined that morning every once in a while for the last two years.

There are somethings that are just too big for me to grab onto.  My brain explodes when I attempt to consider what's outside the universe; infinity is too much for me.  Getting shot feels just like that.  It's completely real, yet I don't remember much about it at all.  I was laughing and then I was bleeding and I couldn't bring my girlfriend's daughter home, as I had promised. I had bullet holes in my body. Some one tried to kill me.

I had no framework, no experience, no guideposts.  I was lucky to have trained therapists who helped me heal.  That's the kind of loop that could dominate my life; in fact, some version of it is on in the back of my head, volume down to soft mute, pretty much all the time.  Behavioral techniques and recognizing the triggers that set me off and learning to soothe myself are effective and helpful ways to deal with it. They don't touch on that head-splitting question: What does it all mean?

I would go to the Academy and inquire of Aristotle.  I'd leave offerings at Delphi.  I'll sit up late at night and hash it out with friends and philosophers and kings and I'll still be unable to grasp it.  I need more than the facts.  I need it to have a purpose, to be more than a random event that left us bereft.  So, I'm going to try this on for a while.  I'll keep you posted.

Healing Outside the Box

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*****

Andrew Weill told me to make a list of things that make me happy over the course of a week, and then to read that list every night, before I go to sleep.  He says it will make me happier, and that that happiness will last for six months.  I just might give it a try.

I'm not the kind of person I seem to have become the kind of person who takes advice from a speaker at a book festival.  I am opening myself up to all kinds of interventions these days.  Making a list and checking it twice doesn't seem all that ridiculous right now.

Having determined that stress and anxiety and fear cause inflammation, I began to take glucosamine and turmeric, two natural anti-inflammatories.  I allowed myself a moment of self-congratulation when Dr. Weill included them, along with melatonin, as the only supplements he would recommend.  After listening to him talk about just how much Omega 3's he thinks I should ingest (2-4 grams per day) I can't call it a supplement; for him, it's a food group.

"Social connectedness breeds happiness," said he, as I looked at Elizibeth to my left and Ms. Rochester to my right, the three of us in a room of hundreds of like-minded people.  Typing it to you, now, sends a warm rush down the center seam above my sternum..... I'm sharing that muffin as you're reading these words.  Are you smiling as much as I am?

My acupuncture studio separates the treatment areas with sheer drapery, not opaque walls.  You are on the table alone, but the energy of the room washes over each and every client.  It might feel creepy, but considering the fact that the treatment involves hammering steel pins into your head, "creepy" is relative.  For me, there is something wonderful about the communal aspect of the healing.

Ms. Rochester and I went to a restorative yoga class last week.  We were 20 strangers in a too small room but somehow we made it work.  The postures were seated or flat on the mat, with bolsters and eye cushions to soften the tensions of the day.  Part of the joy was the rhythmic breathing I began to notice about halfway through.  Without direction, we were inhaling and exhaling as one.

Today I tried a new modality - Chi Nei Tsang (CNT).  As with most Asian healing practises, the explanation doesn't leave you much closer to the experience than you were before you read the words.  For example, this is how my practitioner describes it: CNT... helps bring all the major systems of the body into balance through focused work on the belly...(i)ncorporating breath, touch and Chi Kung.

No, I do not know what Chi Kung is.

I do know that lying on the padding on the floor, close to the earth, feeling her fingers following my meridians, I began to relax and let go of tensions so familiar that I kinda miss them now that they are gone. There were hot stones and gentle tuggings but mostly it was two people focused on healing the damage that bullets had caused.  We were strangers, but we were entwined.

Dr. Weill is right - social connectedness does lead to happiness.