A few days ago, my boss and I went out on a sales call together in an effort to help me get better at selling heating and cooling units. We pulled up to the home address we had been sent to and as we walked up to ring the bell, saw that the garage door was hanging decidedly crookedly, and halfway from being closed.
Our knock was answered by a very lovely older woman, she was most likely in her sixties or perhaps even seventies; but like some redheads can be… her face was remarkably unlined. Her skin had that milky, creamy color of a blend between copper undertones, fair surface, and faded, but plentiful freckles. She had chocolate brown eyes, so deep in their velveteen color that the pupils seemed invisible, the exact same shade of brown that my boss, Tom’s eyes are. For some reason, I made a metal note of how similar they were…how straight forward, and unblinking, and available. Her hair the color of copper kettles, which no doubt was once true, but now poured forth from a bottle hidden under the bathroom sink.
Her posture also captured my attention, her upper chest seemed deeply concave as if missing whole segments of itself, while her upper abdomen had a distinct, round, and hard appearing knot…like a mini soccer ball hidden under her t-shirt. In the moments that followed, she reported, in a very straightforward manner that she had terminal cancer, which began as breast cancer – (hence the concave chest) – that had metastasized into bone cancer. (No doubt the mini soccer ball knot was some form of growth, no longer controlled by the body’s striving for well-being.)
In time she reported a laundries list of woes that would have made Job blush as though he were an imposter, only pretending to be beset upon. A son without a job for more than three years, a daughter in prison for kidnapping a grandchild, a business she had sold whose new owner was under deep suspicion for illegal activity and her name still on the insurance forms, a house theft that took all the possessions she had intended to pass on, another grandchild so frightening she had to call the police and have him evicted, an air conditioner working only occasionally, and of course a garage door hanging akimbo as though hit by a mortar round meant for a tank.
Living on disability…my boss had the decency to quit trying to sell her an air conditioner, and instead attempted to price a piece meal one that might fit her budget needs, by getting a monthly payment that might be doable, even on her meager income. But even that was not possible…thus just as we had packed up the computer, Tom offered to try to help with her garage door, (something I had the impulse to offer the moment we had arrived – but had held my tongue because I was, after all, with my boss.)
We went out to the garage and me holding and pushing, and he striving and lifting, we managed to get the door back on its tracks only to discover the track was too bent to allow the smooth operation of the door, and so had to retire from the commitment to fix it.
Back inside to wash the grime from our hands, Grace – whose Doctors had proclaimed her “Amazing” for having outlasted their end-of-days predictions three different times – began to cry from gratitude, which I suspect may well have been coupled with a dash of humiliation as well. (We Americans are nothing, if not, proud of our need-no-help-make-it-happen, belief in ourselves.)
As Tom stood in the threshold, his arms hanging limply from his shoulders, and a deer in the headlight kind of look in his matched set of Labradoodle brown eyes… I took Grace by the shoulders, looked into her equally lipid brown eyes and told the truth about Life, and living and dying, and strength and weakness, and the three of us playing the roles of need, and strength, and help.
“Grace” I said, “Under it all…at the very core of things, we are all a single moving heart. This one in need of help, this one strong enough to provide it, this one willing to support the moving toward it.”
“One day soon”, I said, “Tom’s strength and intelligence, and my will and capacity will fail us both…and we will take a turn in the role, in which you now find yourself. We will lose our capacity to care for ourselves, by ourselves, as surely as has been taken from you now. There is no difference between us; only the illusion of time separates us even now. That we are here and willing to serve, that you are in need of that service…and that together we can all make a difference, is a good thing…wouldn’t you agree?”
Her tears dried and her nod was barely there, but an acknowledgment none-the-less.
As Tom and I left, I thanked him for his service… but what I really felt gratitude for; was a moment of authentic experience, one free of the role of professions and the marketplace, of expectations and strivings, of buying and selling.
And the very next day my prediction came true….
Required to travel to Tucson two hours from home, I arrived at my ten o’clock appointment precisely at ten o’clock. I got out of the car, rang the bell, was greeted at the door, and then realized I did not have my glasses on the chain I wear around my neck to carry them by. I told my customer I would be right back and went out the door to my car.
Somehow I placed a foot wrong, or my toe caught the edge of the curb, or who knows what… and I fell…all my weight coming down upon my right arms elbow.
I don’t know if it was the shock, or the placement of the hit, or just plain stubbornness… but after a few minutes to catch my breath I got up and went back into the house and did my job. Two hours later, I called my regional manager, and told him I thought I had hurt myself and needed medical attention.
He instructed me to head home to Phoenix, and I began attempting just that. I stopped to put gas in my car and get a much-needed bottle of water, when Tom called and told me to turn around and head back to the clinic in Tucson.
Just about that time, my arm began to seize.
The muscle running under my arm, connecting to my elbow began to charley horse, curling my fingers inward like the talons of a predatory bird. As my fingers dragged themselves across my palm, the tendons stretched and tightened and ground what turned out to be a broken bone across itself in a mind-numbing arc of white-hot pain. It caused my legs to strain against the floorboard of my car, pushing their way thru the mat and beyond the engine floor. My mouth formed a sound, that was both primal and forceful and tears began to be squeezed forth from beneath my tightly shut lids.
I made it to the clinic, now spent… and deeply impacted by the seizures.
Inside, no doubt due to my appearance, I was taken directly into a room, guided there by a young and probably somewhat inexperienced intake nurse. As we sat there, she on her rolling stool and me on a chair at the foot of the exam table, my arm seized again and I kicked out with my foot and hit the metal footrest at the end of the exam table. The sound of metal being banged, coupled with the sound I was making… and the young nurse bolted so fast from her stool, that it ricocheted off the opposite wall, rolling to a stop like a ball in one of those old-fashioned pinball machines.
As my muscle let go of my fingers, and I could once again breathe, I sat and awaited what now seemed a patently obvious diagnosis of a broken arm.
A temporary splint quieted the spasms, and I was sent to a hotel to rest before driving myself home the next day.
That morning I made my way to the breakfast buffet, having not had anything to eat since breakfast the morning before. My arm in a sling and incapable of raising itself, I wanted some orange juice from a coke like dispenser machine, sitting atop the counter. I had however, a large obstacle to overcome…I could hold the glass under the nozzle, or I could push the button to dispense the juice…but I could not do both at the same time. A boy of perhaps fifteen stood beside me waiting for his waffle to finish cooking, and the buzzer to sound that would indicate its completion, and so I asked him if he would push the button for me.
Hid did so, with great reluctance. The look of being put out was so loud and clear upon his countenance, that he might has well have been screaming it.
And I thought again about Grace, and the fact that this young man…when youth and vigor pass, will be in my position and soon Grace’s, before he can even figure out where it all went.
Home again, and everything one needs to do to care for oneself is now triple the effort, and requires four times the stamina.
Cooking, dressing, cleaning, personal care, bathing, and teeth brushing all hampered and suddenly demanding…work impossible and no income to anticipate, my world is once again confined to the four walls of my home.
I spent the first two days in bed, smiling at myself at how quickly my turn at being in need manifested itself.
It was three years ago, almost to the day, that I was laid off and washed ashore upon a financial and professional desert island…trapped inside my lack of funds, I went nowhere and spent as little money as was humanly possible.
I spent those years dedicating myself to the Wisdom of “No Escape.”
“When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, these very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hopeful well-being”. – Henri Nouwen
The full and committed realization that we are here primarily to Witness the workings of our own mind, to understand that our perceptions color everything we see, to know and come to embrace the fullness of the truth that the external world is not where our destiny lies, but rather at the deep center of the Oneself that yearns for escape from the personality it formed and created out of the dust of the story of “me”, to turn our attention to the inner mind and seek our healing not in the body, or in the world, or in the gains or losses we see as appearances all around us…but rather, to take full and total responsibility for every thought and emotion that bubbles to the surface from out of nowhere, this is the Wisdom of No Escape.
Every thought we produce that rides the surface of our minds and entices us to this goal or that one, to this experience or that opportunity, is merely a clever disguise created out of the ever-capable mind as a means of escaping the very much unconscious burden of the “self”. We run from this, or to that, all the days of our lives… always unaware that the very thing we want rid of is the self that cannot be “improved”, but instead must be seen through for the false idol it truly is.
If we can calm the desire to run for even a moment, if we can find within us the willingness to turn and face the monster, if we can give up hoping for a better life, and instead turn our attention to discovering the one we are in the very midst of…then and only then, may we end up being of some use.
Amazing Grace is not the miracle that lifts us above the messy business of life, but rather the one that takes us deeper and deeper into the quivering mess of the middle of the thing, until miracle upon miracle… we discover the freshness that lies beneath the grasp of the conditioned mind.
And here to find that … No Escape Is Needed…
Adayre R. Miller
7/18/11
Photo courtesy of flikr photo sharing and Michael Brooking Photography to view more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/13385494@N02/3470092775/
