Exposure

I don’t expect anyone to read very far in this one. Here’s why. Its about disappointment and hopelessness. I remember a time just months after I had my stroke, years before I realized how “lucky” I am. I had moved out of my country home, a dome house on 3 wooded acres. I was living alone for the first time in years. I was deep in grief, in fact, I was never sure what I was grieving, the loss of my marriage, family, country home, health, or career. It all went so quickly.

Amazingly, I could walk then, even drive. I was so bereft that I sought out a therapist, I needed someone to talk with, someone who could help me put myself back together again. Surprisingly, I found someone who was a stroke survivor, someone who knew something of what I was facing. Little did I know, my luck was already operating. I went to work with her, only to find that her regard for me, manifested through her puncturing my hope. Each visit she made clear to me, that despite my attachment to returning to some version of normalcy, that, that was not likely. Gradually, I gave up any notion I had about returning to anything like I had been.

She was ruthless and skilled. I went a way from each session more bereft, and with a greater recognition of my situation. And, that was before the rare brain syndrome came on. Then, over a four-year period, I lost a whole lot more of the capabilities I had left, including any hope of surviving. It was the hopelessness of my situation, which brought about the transformation of my consciousness.

That is what this missive is about; the unsavory nature of what transformed me. There is no sugar coating it. I had to give my hope up, not because it was a good idea, but because I had to. I was on the way out. So it looked — hope for recovery was gone — I lived like a terminal patient. I didn’t know when my time was coming, but I knew it was. Later, I lost more than my physical functioning. I was not my body, nor was I my hopes, dreams, or aspirations. In the end, I was reduced to a quivering mass of helpless flesh.

Living to reflect upon that time at death’s doorstep, I have come to realize that hope, the illusion of control, and thinking I know anything, are completely foolish. I had to be at the end of the rope given to me, to get that none of the presumed protections like hope, faith, or love, really serve —when Life knocks, and asks for everything. I became aware of how vulnerable we humans are. I didn’t like knowing it then, and I don’t like knowing it now. Luckily, Life forced me to know it, to feel vividly just how raw and vulnerable I am — we all are. I didn’t know it till later, but that knowing, about how vulnerable we all are, set me free.

Recently, I have been dwelling with David Whyte’s exhortation to elders to “inhabit our vulnerability.”  Despite my experience, I imagined that David was advising we elders to try to make ourselves vulnerable. That way we are more likely to experience and communicate the wisdom of Life. Now instead, I realize that that vulnerability is a given — it just is— because we humans exist, we participate in the if-i-ness and uncertainty of Creation. I am just as vulnerable now as I ever have been.

That doesn’t reassure me, nor does it make my life easier, but it does free me from the mirages of my attachments to hope and believing. These things have the effect of closing me down, of obscuring the real miracle I get to live within. I am now much more caught-up in the moment, sensitized by what I’ve been through — more existentially open and vulnerable. Life comes to, and through me, in amazingly complex and simple ways.

Giving up hope was essential for me (it wasn’t voluntary), I suffered complete exposure, and I have since, realized how genuinely “lucky” I am.  May you know hopelessness, not knowing, and the loss of control, in your aging process — may you experience such exposure — — so you can be amongst the happy ones.