For those of you who are fans of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of human needs I would like to proudly announce I’m self-actualizing, which is just a fancy way of saying I’m retired and I have time to think about both inane and important things.
I’ve worked hard at this. I’ve worked on myself trying to find that well-earned chill state of life where only the important stuff is important. See, life changing thoughts.
Truly, I have worked at prioritizing those things in my dotage I deem important, not necessarily what others think is important.
I always think I’m there. But, like golf after I’ve hit a couple of good shots in a row and I think I’ve got this game figured out I have to hit the stupid ball again and doing that proves I ain’t there.
I thought I had this whole Zen thing down, I thought I had found the way the light and the truth about being calm and serene even in the face of adversity.
When I took care of Marty I fed off anxiety. Worry and anxiety followed me around like a dark cloud.
But I’m retired from work and care giving, I’m Zen, I don’t do worry and anxiety anymore, I conquered all that.
Except, when I helped a buddy through his first week of knee replacement surgery. We ended up in the emergency room the night after his surgery. That burst of adrenaline that brought sweat and a roiling stomach came back to greet me like an old, hated friend. Boom, I was back.
A temporary setback on my journey to bliss.
Until a friend fell and hit his head and the ambulance took him to the hospital emergency room. I went in and out of his room carrying my old friend anxiety on my back again. There it was that miserable black dread feeling again.
It went away, until my father fell and broke his hip. There we were again, in an emergency room, a surgical waiting room, a hospital room, a rehab room. My old companions of hyper vigilance, worry and dread stood up and hitched a ride in my brain.
I’m clearly not that enlightened.
Or maybe, maybe what I’m talking about are the passages of a life, a life well lived and well loved, a life where other people and their lives mean a lot. Maybe, just maybe I will never get past those episodes of psychic fear and doubt and dread and anxiety and all the fun physical manifestations of those feelings. Maybe accepting these moments as part of all our journeys is the real Zen, the real self-actualization.
Maybe.
Maybe we learn, maybe we see we can do some hard things and still thrive. Maybe we thrive because we do those hard things. I don’t know for sure.
I do know I once sat on the edge of my bathtub fretting about Marty one night. The anxiety was crippling and making me feel ill. I told myself, I just need to quit caring, I just need to separate myself from the emotional part of the caregiving, I need to not love her.
Yeah right, I could and can be rather moronic from time to time.
I can’t help but care, it’s part of my DNA. You can’t either, it’s what we do, it is the price of love.
It’s a price I’m willing to pay because leading with the heart is the only way through, we sometimes must take the pain.
We can do that and still get to the whole self-actualization thing. It’s just the dark part of life we all must experience and then keep walking the path.
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