Fourth Form of Madness

Once there was monk crossing a courtyard in the centre of a town.  The town’s policeman spied the monk crossing the courtyard and as a social courtesy asked him where he was going.  The monk replied “I don’t know”.  This angered the policeman as he felt the monk did not think him worthy of telling him where he was going.  So the policeman asked the monk again “Where are you going?”.  The monk replied again “I don’t know”.  By now the policeman was furious and demanded to know where the monk was going.  For a third time the monk replied “I don’t know”.  With that the policeman arrested the monk and took him to the police station.  At the police station the policeman said to the monk, “Tell me now where you were going”, to which the monk replied “I did. I didn’t know where I was going.  I thought I was going to the market but I ended up here.  So you see, I really didn’t know where I was going”.

I love this story.  I read it many years ago but it still holds true today.  You can plan and schedule and diarise all you want, but no-one ultimately knows what is going to happen in life and no-one has any control over the journey.  Best to be like the monk and acknowledge this gracefully as you go about your business of living.

I had a beautiful reminder of this only just last night.  My husband and I set out for dinner with friends and it ended up with me spending 4.5 hrs in the emergency department of a local public hospital.  Everything had gone just as expected.  We all enjoyed a curry and a few drinks, a few laughs.  We were post dinner and gathered in the kitchen solving all the problems of the world when the brother of our host came in feeling terribly unwell.  He clearly didn’t look healthy, he was clammy to touch, pale and his heart was racing.  He asked if he could stay with us as he didn’t want to be alone in his house.

Soon it became clear that he really should be checked out medically.  So off we trundled, the ever caring wife of the host couple, me and brother in tow.  The emergency department reception was surprising vacant and silent and soon pale and shaky brother is taken behind the automatic opening and closing doors into the sterile chaos that is the emergency department.  Meanwhile we caught up on our gossip magazines from 2011 and eyed off the only copy of Better Homes and Garden that another lady in the waiting room had.

Shortly after we were hustled into a curtained cubicle to wait with the brother who then went through blood tests, an ECG and X-ray and other various medical checks.  Being in this curtained off space was like being in a box.  We could hear and sense people all around us but we couldn’t see them.  As we sat there, hour after hour, the noise and commotion outside the curtain became louder and louder.  Doctors came in, doctors went out.  Nurses came in, nurses went out.

The patients in the next cubicles changed over several times during our visit.  One, I am guessing, was a teenage girl that had just suffered a major fit.  Apparently she had only just got over another major fit two weeks ago and had only just returned to school 2 days ago.  She was drugged out and had minimal responses.  As I sat there wondering if it was a crime to use my i-phone in emergency, I heard her mumble something to her mother.  Her mother replied “No it’s okay no one saw love, you were in your room”.  As I looked down at my i-phone a tear fell to its screen.  I put my phone in my pocket and started concentrating on my grateful list.

About a month ago I went to lunch with a friend.  Over a curry (um that’s a reoccurring theme) and a wine, I confided to my friend that I was living in so much fear about various things and negativity.  Her eloquent and useful response was “You need to practice more gratefulness and trust – those two things will smash through fear”.  Well she certainly was onto something.  Since that lunch I have been starting my day, usually as I drive to the train station, going through the things that I am grateful for.  The first time I did the list I was surprised at how many things there were on my list.  This had should a transformative effort on me.  To focus on the positive rather than the negative, that I have kept it up every day since.  It’s just like my asana practice now, if I don’t do it daily something feels a little missing from the day.  This simple act of just running over mentally all the things I am grateful for has made me feel more positive in general, which has made me feel more friendly towards others, which in turn has made them more friendly and co-operative towards me.  Why don’t they teach this stuff in school? 🙂

Anyway after many tests later, shaky and clammy brother is thankfully advised he is not having a stroke or heart attack.  I’m sure that is going to make his grateful list for sometime to come.  We finally get out of there just as things are reaching their crescent of babies screaming and various people yelling about various things.  Later as I fall into bed well after midnight and in the knowledge that I have to be up at 6.30am, I reflect on the evenings events and conclude, I never thought the evening was going to end up being spent mainly in the emergency department.  Yet strangely it feels like it worked out just the way it was meant to and just the way it always was going to ………regardless of my input.  And I am grateful for that.

About 2 months ago my husband and I planted a veggie garden.  We have been talking about it for a while but one Sunday we got up and went and did it and it has been a source of amusement and amazement ever since.  Everyday I like to go out there with my dog and inspect the leaves for bugs and welcome new shoots. Sometimes if I have time I hand water.  This simple act of tending to the earth brings me so much joy.  The fact that you can watch this creation evolve day after day, that out of nothing comes something so bountiful and delicious that then nurtures you seems to me like a little bit of wonder!

Actually to me it seems purely magically.  Take for example the asparagus we have growing.  We planted this 4 years ago from seed and as far as we were concerned it was just a weed growing in the corner.  However, when we recently made over our veggie garden and replanted, we cut it all back.  Low and behold there are asparagus shoots sprouting up all over the place now.  One day there is nothing,  the next day there will be 4 new spears ready for picking.  My mind loves this.  Nothing then something, all you have to do is feed the soil a little, spend a little time watering and give it some daily attention.

So I couldn’t help connecting that often this is the way we grow and be bountiful as well.  If you want to manifest something in yourself or in your life, then surely it must be a little the same. First get yourself in an enabling, supportive environment.  If I planted the seeds to my veggie garden in gravel, I don’t think anything would have grown.  We are similar.  For example, If you want to promote a positive attitude in yourself, it is going to be harder to achieve that if you hang out with people that do little else but point out your short comings.  Seek out those environments which are most conducive to what you want to achieve and then let yourself be effected by the environment, let it slowly influence you until it becomes second nature to you.

Next you will need nourishment, water and sunlight or as I like to think of these things, passion, courage and faith.  Passion is whatever you love doing.  It could be cross stitching, reading french literature, cooking, whatever, just let yourself spend some time doing these activities regularly.  There is nothing like spending time doing activities that you are passionate about or that inspire you. I feel it every time I pick up a philosophy book, a certain fire just ignites in me no matter how tired or how busy I am.  Courage is a wonderful precursor of growth.  For all of us who have been stuck due to one fear or another at some stage in our life, there is no greater feeling that finding the courage to move past the fear.  My regular fear is failure.  Each time I am courageous enough to move past that fear I feel fantastic.  When I don’t, and I stay stuck in fear I now feel a little disappointed in my self, like I have let myself down. Then there is faith.  This faith is faith in yourself.  When you know yourself, your ethics, your shadow, your weaknesses, your strengths – faith in yourself can gain a foothold and grow from there.

Who would have thought there is so much knowledge on  how to live and thrive growing all around us just waiting for us to pause long enough to have a conversation with it.  I guess I finally did pause and in doing so have found a new passion – gardening.

I am currently studying a sociology unit that studies how the concept of health and illness in society is constructed.  There was much ummming and arhing on my part whether I should go back to study this semester as I have a fair bit on in my life this year and I am still working with the death of my father last year.  As soon as I picked up my book to start the course, I knew I had made the right decision to return.  As I began my first article to review and analyse I felt that oh so joyous rush of passion fill my being and I knew  for me, at this moment, my return to sociology/philosophy was the best decision in terms of my wellbeing I could have made. To others it may have looked like adding another thing to my long list of things to do but to me it was returning home to a love that nurtures and inspires me and in a way rejuvenates all in life around me.

I find it ironic that my first unit back is one that so heavily focuses on the dominance of the biomedical (modern medicine) perspective and questions it authority.  I feel like I have spent most of last year fighting with modern medical establishments so it’s nice to read about it for a change 🙂  When going through traumatic and highly emotional situations, it is always rather interesting to be clear about what roles people naturally fall back into to play.  I don’t mean this disrespectfully but we all have patterns that we easily fall into when faced with adversity.  The role is easy for us, allows us to almost go on auto-pilot as other parts of ourselves that we perhaps don’t want to examine, retreat into the safety and the focus that the role demands.  When I look throughout the duration of my father’s illness, which pretty much required him to stay in hospital for the whole time, my role I slipped immediately into was that of “justice fighter”.  I’ve done it since as long as I can remember, my first external reaction is never sadness, fear or bewilderment.  My first reaction is always anger at some perceived injustice before me and action as to how I am going to put this right because it is the right thing to do.  But then anger is so much easier to handle than grief.

So there I am in the mist of medical madnesses.  I am in good company, my mother’s role in situations like this is to switch into “polly anna” externally positive as  everything is going to be all right in the end and my brother’s is the “martyrdom”.  I love them both very deeply (them and their roles they switch into) and they all serve their purpose in that crazy situation we were in.  For example, I would never have been able to deal with getting my father back to hospital after it became clear after only two weeks after coming out of hospital that the tumour they had removed from his spine, had grown back.  The pain no longer made it an option to be at home and it was my mother and brother that struggled to get my father, a then screaming and trembling man, into the car to start the 1.5 hr journey.  And then sit with him in the car for the next 4 hours as the hospital tried to get him out of the car but couldn’t due to the extreme pain.  It would have been my style however to then scream at the hospital for not thinking it a good idea to send an ambulance to go get a person that was essentially from that point on a paraplegic and never got out of bed for the remainder of his life.

My father was transferred to a different hospital under the guise of “better rehabilitation facilities” that both my brother and I were not pleased with.  When it became clear our fears were justified, when after 4 weeks no one had bothered to advise my mother was going on with my father’s condition even though she was in his room for 8 hours or more every day – my “justice fighter” role stepped up again.   This time I was joined by my brother, who through his work with children living with cancer, had also had contact with the hospital they were sending my father to and he didn’t feel the hospital was the best communicator either.  I had worked there many years ago and still shutter at the mentioning of it’s name.  It is the most sterile, disempowering and unwelcoming environment for people that are not well that one could possibly find.  I don’t want anyone going there let alone my father.

So off I went.  First I was ignored and had to keep phoning.  Then when they did call they treated with me a mocking, condescending tone.  Then when I started talking legal action for asking my father to make medical decisions on his behalf when he was no longer sound of mind (he was on such high levels of morphine based drugs that he was no longer always lucid and he was also off his bi-polar medication) and not bothering to consult his legal guardians, they started to fight me.  The fact that they said he was sound of mind concerned me the most, as for the last week before this my brother, mother and I had all been playing along with his illusion of being on a cruise ship in the Bahamas with him (an illusion of his we were more than happy to perpetuate).  This clearly told us how much time they were spending talking with my father.

Instead of speaking to my mother about what was going on with my father, the doctor went straight in and told my father that I had objected to his treatment which upset my father greatly.  Hello my name is “rage”.  I still can not comprehend this display of insensitivity and total lack of compassion for my father.  The whole discussion was about trying to open communication, to my mother mainly as she was becoming stressed and sick about not knowing what was going on.  The medic powers to be flatly refused to do it. Even better they chose to display their “power” by upsetting an already sick and traumatised man.  I won’t say we won as this whole situation is not early about winning and losing but about dignity and caring but he did get shifted back to his hospital of choice before he died and we were all very grateful for that.

So back to the present,  I embark on this journey into this new unit with much interest and passion and reflection.  I embrace the life experiences that I have just moved through and hold them to the “knowledge’ that I am now learning in a formal setting and compare if art truly does reflect life or whether truly there is no imitation of life to be had.

In this society we tend to love success.  Why not it feels great to succeed at the job interview, the footy game or lotto!  We embrace success, share our success stories and celebrate the success of others.  Failure is not celebrated in our society.  It is not spoken about (usually) or embraced or celebrated.  We all remember who came first in the race but rarely the person that came over the line last.

However, both success and failure are journeys that should be embraced and celebrated as they are so entwined and feed off each other symbiotically.  If you always succeed, always ride the wave of success, you never have the chance to learn to fail and fail in style. Seriously, you need the experience of a failure, to feel how it feels, to review the experience, to see it for just what it is – life and nothing more.  And then to just pick yourself up and try again.  If you never experience failure, in what ever shape and form, you never get the chance to know the beast for what it is, to realise it ain’t  such a beast at all and that life, and all it’s ups and down will roll on regardless.

This is a lesson that is very close to my heart.  As a typical card carrying A type personality, I have always strived to achieve in everything I do and be good at it.  Over the years I had manage to build up a fear of failure so great that I could make myself pass out over the thought of it.  🙂 And then I started yoga and a funny thing happened.  With each class, each session of being guided by skilful and beautiful teachers, I started to naturally experience a shift in perspective, mindset.  I no longer looked at the mat as a place to achieve but instead a peaceful place of meditation to tune in my body and my movements and my breath and to drop out of the constant chatter, often negative, about myself.  A refuge.

Along with this I was encouraged to try things that I once never would have tried because I would have pre-empted I would fail.  Oh failure, can’t be doing that.  Not with yoga, with a non-attachment to achievement, a letting go of results, came a thirsty sense of self-enquiry to approaching an asana.  With this new attitude, anything is approachable and dare I say it, an adventure.  There is so much to be had in trying, attempting, in adapting the asana so it suits your body at that moment on that day.  The jewel is in the attempting with integrity no matter what the end point, not in only attempting asanas that you know you can achieve and do perfectly.  When is life ever really like that, only bringing what you like and can cope with?

So today in a class that I was teaching when we came to side crow, I paused and surveyed the room.  There were people attempting the asana but there were many more that were  looking at me like I was the craziest lady in the universe.  I sensed some apprehension and fear and resistance to trying.  So respecting and embracing their fear I tried to talk them to their edge or at least take a step closer to their edge.  I advised them to first and foremost have some fun with this, play with this asana gently and not to be afraid of falling (in their mind failure) as falling is often the part of the process and seldom do we hurt ourselves when we fall.  And most of all, we are going to fall in life, so we really should learn to do it in style 🙂 and to learn to abandon ourselves to the falling process.  And then as if on cue, a lady fell in grand style.  I walked over to her, asked her if she was okay, and she assured me she was and then she got back up and gave it another go.  I could not have asked for a better demonstration if I asked.

If I have learnt anything in this life, it is that we all need to learn to fall, to fail.  We all need to learn to embrace, celebrate and even rejoice these falls as until we do this, until we are able to experience and see clearly failing for what it is, and that it is just life rolling along as it does, a necessary and natural part of life, we will never appreciate and rejoice our successes.  Knowing one without the other is like only seeing the light side of the moon, and that is not the complete picture.  When we bring success and failure together within ourselves we find we are just left with life.  And that’s the way life rolls….