keep on truckin

A few months ago Vince and I found the time to go and visit my mother’s cousin in Indianapolis. His name is Pete. When I was growing up, Pete was that one relative who I always thought “got” me. He was around at all the important times in my life. He was a free spirit and had the ability to make light of even the stickiest family conversations. Shortly after Vince and I got married, Pete’s sixteen year old son was killed in a car accident. I wondered how he could survive such a tragedy. A few years later, he fell off a ladder and broke his back. He survived through the recovery with that same amazing Pete spirit. Today, Pete lives in the room built onto his house where he lies all day, every day in his hospital bed. He has some sort of neurological illness that has taken away his ability to walk and now his ability to speak, to eat regular food, to feed himself and to engage in any way other than with his eyes and hopefully soon his fingers on a communication device. As one might imagine, about the only thing you can say about this is “this sucks”.

So, on our visit, I sat across from him wondering what it must be like to be inside there, inside his body. Are any of us ready to be able to live inside our bodies? Truly inside. I wonder if Pete has learned about his thinking and somehow was able to find peace with how his physical body was deteriorating? I wonder if he decided he could find joy in looking outside the window, hearing about other people’s lives, watching his unbelievably devoted wife live her life and watching Raymond on television? I wonder if he was able to find peace in how people, including myself, began to slowly (or not so slowly) stop visiting. We can all be so afraid to look at how our life might turn out, that we turn our heads, afraid to look at the cracks. Just a side note, Leonard Cohen says “looking at the cracks is how we let the light in.”

As I left our visit, so many things were running through my mind that I was sort of in shut down mode. Well, actually, I was in eat-lots-of-blueberry-pie-mode at the Traverse City Pie Company.

This thinking comes again as my maternal grandmother has had a rather rapid physical and mental deterioration. She is now in the nursing home and is again able to recognize people and communicate, but her quality of life isn’t so great. Actually, I would say it’s not great at all. It does make you, or at least me, wonder, at some point don’t you just want to throw in the towel? I don’t want to be in a nursing home, nor does anyone else I know. Where do people find the joy to keep on truckin? Do they find the joy, or do they just muddle through? Do we have a choice…do we get to decide between the two?

I see this same theme as people I know and love retire from the work that they have devoted most of their waking hours. As they leave their jobs, I see a sort of stumbling around trying to figure out what’s next? What is next? Is it taking care of the grandkids and volunteering? Does golf on Mondays, housework on Tuesdays, volunteering on Thursdays and time with friends on Friday’s end up satisfying us?

How do we look forward when we realize that there are more years behind us than ahead of us? How do you look forward when you realize you aren’t going to walk anymore? How do you look forward when you leave the role you have identified with for most of your life? Where oh where does that will to live come from and why is it I’m not sure if I’ve got it? It’s that age old question…what in the world is all of this for? Is it so I can end up in a nursing home with someone calling me “honey’ and giving me really crappy food after I have spent most of my adult life trying to eat organic and fresh?

As you can see, or read, that line of thinking ain’t gonna get us anywhere. In fact, the joke is on us. There isn’t anywhere for us to get. The reason the future can look so scary and icky, is because the future doesn’t even exist. I know I sound nuts (and probably depressed) but really, this moment is all there is. There isn’t anything else other than now. So, trying to figure out what might lie ahead of us is wasting right now. I am not implying here that there aren’t things we need to plan for, like life insurance and a retirement fund, but what I am saying is anything other than those practicalities is futile and ultimately irrelevant. The only point of all this is there is no point. If you can step back for a second it is riotously funny. We can’t know if we are gonna be the one getting a sponge bath or climbing a mountain when we are 90. We can only know now, that how we treat our bodies in this moment may increase the odds that we are climbing rather than sponging. We can know that the disgusting blended salad smoothie (don’t get me started) is way better for my body than the vegan chocolate shake I’m craving. We can know that getting on our mat increases the likelihood that we will keep our balance and reduce the likelihood of falling and breaking a hip if we get to grow old, going for a brisk walk might help reduce the likelihood of our heart giving out sooner than we want and practicing pranayama might come in handy if we get trapped inside the body.

The way all this wondering and questioning and suffering ceases is that we recognize that we are not our roles, we are not our jobs, we are not our parents, we are not our kids, we are not our bodies, we are not our thoughts, we are not our minds, we are not our past, we are not our future. There really is no “me” who needs satisfied. Really, there isn’t. Whether we have lived half of our life doesn’t really matter. What matters is that who we are is what is looking outside this shell of a body and who we are will be here when it’s gone. This “who we are” is there even if work stops, if this body stops working, even if the body can no longer produce sound, even if life isn’t going as planned, even if I’m getting a sponge bath, even if the body is sick, even if our husband leaves, even if our outside world falls apart. This recognition just might be what keeps us truckin.