It is Southern tradition to eat black-eyed peas and ham in a dish called Hoppin’ John’s on New Year’s Day to ensure a good new year, and my wife stands by this tradition as firmly as she loves puppies. It was a perfect batch this year and I ate it blithely, knowing that it could not fail – not after the hideous week that closed out our last tired and tattered year of 2017. So hideous a year that it will last in my memory like the moon landing or the rise of Amazon.com stock in the 1990’s. Yes, call my bluff – it was not that spectacular, but you get the drift. Awful. Good riddance. And for that awfulness I am grateful.
It started the morning after Christmas, which had been bland and unremarkable as far as Christmas days go. There had been no parties, no excess drinking, no wild flirtations with death in the wilderness, and Lord knows no heavy lifting. And yet there I was on the morning of December 26 in spasms of pain simply for trying to get out of bed. In a matter of seconds, I realized that my lower back had become completely worthless, and with the attendant pain, I realized that the lower back is attached to nearly every other part of the body. Even a deep breath hurt, and no movement of anything that required the slightest twitch of the body core was possible without stabbing pain. It was then that it struck me like Red Fox on his 70’s sitcom, that this just “might be the Big One! I’m comin’ home, ‘Lizabeth!” That this just might be the beginning of real old age, when one becomes absolutely dependent on the kindness of family, friends, and paid professionals to function AT ALL. As a matter of fact, within minutes of crawling like a sidewinder out of bed, it became obvious that, like so many old people, even going to the bathroom presented large and embarrassing problems.
Two days later, I was even more convinced, as nothing had gotten better at all. It was frightening, as I could already feel that sympathy for my situation was becoming forced. In years of raising chickens, I found that the flock gave exactly one day for one of their own to get over a bad injury or illness. If it was not better within that time, they would peck it to death, which is, I suppose, a form of mercy for chickens, but not so much for humans. And yet, there they were, my own brood already murmuring ominous clucking noises over my near-complete disability and dependence. The pecking, I feared, was soon to begin in one way or another.
Fortunately, we have a neighbor who is a gifted chiropractor, and after a very painful bought on the clinical table Wednesday evening, I began to be able to move again - not enough to avoid a stampeding buffalo herd, or to fend off an attack of wolves, but enough to keep me from some kind of merciful end at the hands of my loving family. That night, I breathed fairly easily for the first time in two days.
Until the next morning, when I woke with an incredible flow from the mucus membranes. I laughed at the unlikely misfortune of having two rare events happen in just a few days – rare, because my back hadn’t been bad like this in 40 years, and I rarely got anything worse than the sniffles – but I let this concern drop off like so many tissue papers. A cold: big deal. At least I could handle bathroom activities without too much pain now. But I was wrong. By the following day, I realized that this was the Mother of All Colds – that if we could drop this on our enemies, we would conquer the world. Pounding headache, pain and misery everywhere, and, worse, I had already outworn my 24 hours of sympathy with the chickens. I was left to limp around like a forgotten soldier, avoided by the sane and healthy, huddled into my misery of uncleanliness like a leper from biblical times.
Thus it went for two or so days more, until New Year’s Eve, when company came over none-the-less, and I succumbed to a number of choice beverages and liquors until all pain was gone. Surprisingly, the toxic mix had been too much for the cold viruses, as next day all I had left were some sniffles and a bothersome, but temporary, hangover. My back was still sore, but at least it moved. The worst was over. I should have been happy then, but there was a sadness in the loss of my isolation and misery. Even before my miraculous recovery, it had come to me that this stretch of several days filled with misery and loneliness had been a surprising blessing.
This happened on the afternoon of Year’s Eve as I lay back in the easy chair – the only posture I could take that eased my back and allowed me to stop blowing my nose – when I was trying to get back to reading a silly sci-fi trilogy. It was then that I realized that I would normally not be seated in that chair in the afternoon, and I would most certainly not be reading a trashy sci-fi novel. Daytime, after all, is for work of some kind, and reading is for learning. I was only there, useless and un-engaged, because I was a basket case, and it was only because I was a basket case that I had no – absolutely no – expectations for myself, not even one of simple exercise. It was then that the truth filled me – that I was in a cold, dark space, a cave or burrow meant for nothing but healing, and that this was needed.
I had been there before. It had been a long time, and one not missed, but it, too, had had its value. As one person put it, extreme misery is not personally worth it, but it is worth something. But minor misery, the type I experienced recently, could truly be worth it. In that dark cave of healing, one is quiet, without bluster, without vanity or ego. One is simply being, almost in hibernation, but not, for one thinks. What one thinks isn’t clever, or even useful. It is as basic as a child’s, with no more cogitation than a cheap sci-fi novel read intermittently. It allows a different self to come through, one that is neither happy nor sad nor expectant. Yes, as basic as a child’s, but less so, in that nothing of the normal world either delights or terrifies. This is how and where we truly heal.
The universe, too, takes a pause now and then. What good is a day of sleet and freezing rain? What good, for that matter, is the vast emptiness that is almost the totality of outer space? It is necessary to have this emptiness, this nothingness, this pause, for without it, everything would burn out, from crammed solar systems to crammed lives. For most of us, we are only in this space when ill. It is the price we pay for thinking our personal worlds mean more than they do. Even if it is not worth the price personally, however – even if the illness or the trauma is too great to bear - the universe knows that it must be. And that is why the deepest among us have long said that mercy is behind and beneath it all, for sickness and suffering is required for the health of the soul. For such a creation to lack pity – and mercy – would be to make of it a flock of instinct-driven chickens who could not create a tear, never mind a universe.
It started the morning after Christmas, which had been bland and unremarkable as far as Christmas days go. There had been no parties, no excess drinking, no wild flirtations with death in the wilderness, and Lord knows no heavy lifting. And yet there I was on the morning of December 26 in spasms of pain simply for trying to get out of bed. In a matter of seconds, I realized that my lower back had become completely worthless, and with the attendant pain, I realized that the lower back is attached to nearly every other part of the body. Even a deep breath hurt, and no movement of anything that required the slightest twitch of the body core was possible without stabbing pain. It was then that it struck me like Red Fox on his 70’s sitcom, that this just “might be the Big One! I’m comin’ home, ‘Lizabeth!” That this just might be the beginning of real old age, when one becomes absolutely dependent on the kindness of family, friends, and paid professionals to function AT ALL. As a matter of fact, within minutes of crawling like a sidewinder out of bed, it became obvious that, like so many old people, even going to the bathroom presented large and embarrassing problems.
Two days later, I was even more convinced, as nothing had gotten better at all. It was frightening, as I could already feel that sympathy for my situation was becoming forced. In years of raising chickens, I found that the flock gave exactly one day for one of their own to get over a bad injury or illness. If it was not better within that time, they would peck it to death, which is, I suppose, a form of mercy for chickens, but not so much for humans. And yet, there they were, my own brood already murmuring ominous clucking noises over my near-complete disability and dependence. The pecking, I feared, was soon to begin in one way or another.
Fortunately, we have a neighbor who is a gifted chiropractor, and after a very painful bought on the clinical table Wednesday evening, I began to be able to move again - not enough to avoid a stampeding buffalo herd, or to fend off an attack of wolves, but enough to keep me from some kind of merciful end at the hands of my loving family. That night, I breathed fairly easily for the first time in two days.
Until the next morning, when I woke with an incredible flow from the mucus membranes. I laughed at the unlikely misfortune of having two rare events happen in just a few days – rare, because my back hadn’t been bad like this in 40 years, and I rarely got anything worse than the sniffles – but I let this concern drop off like so many tissue papers. A cold: big deal. At least I could handle bathroom activities without too much pain now. But I was wrong. By the following day, I realized that this was the Mother of All Colds – that if we could drop this on our enemies, we would conquer the world. Pounding headache, pain and misery everywhere, and, worse, I had already outworn my 24 hours of sympathy with the chickens. I was left to limp around like a forgotten soldier, avoided by the sane and healthy, huddled into my misery of uncleanliness like a leper from biblical times.
Thus it went for two or so days more, until New Year’s Eve, when company came over none-the-less, and I succumbed to a number of choice beverages and liquors until all pain was gone. Surprisingly, the toxic mix had been too much for the cold viruses, as next day all I had left were some sniffles and a bothersome, but temporary, hangover. My back was still sore, but at least it moved. The worst was over. I should have been happy then, but there was a sadness in the loss of my isolation and misery. Even before my miraculous recovery, it had come to me that this stretch of several days filled with misery and loneliness had been a surprising blessing.
This happened on the afternoon of Year’s Eve as I lay back in the easy chair – the only posture I could take that eased my back and allowed me to stop blowing my nose – when I was trying to get back to reading a silly sci-fi trilogy. It was then that I realized that I would normally not be seated in that chair in the afternoon, and I would most certainly not be reading a trashy sci-fi novel. Daytime, after all, is for work of some kind, and reading is for learning. I was only there, useless and un-engaged, because I was a basket case, and it was only because I was a basket case that I had no – absolutely no – expectations for myself, not even one of simple exercise. It was then that the truth filled me – that I was in a cold, dark space, a cave or burrow meant for nothing but healing, and that this was needed.
I had been there before. It had been a long time, and one not missed, but it, too, had had its value. As one person put it, extreme misery is not personally worth it, but it is worth something. But minor misery, the type I experienced recently, could truly be worth it. In that dark cave of healing, one is quiet, without bluster, without vanity or ego. One is simply being, almost in hibernation, but not, for one thinks. What one thinks isn’t clever, or even useful. It is as basic as a child’s, with no more cogitation than a cheap sci-fi novel read intermittently. It allows a different self to come through, one that is neither happy nor sad nor expectant. Yes, as basic as a child’s, but less so, in that nothing of the normal world either delights or terrifies. This is how and where we truly heal.
The universe, too, takes a pause now and then. What good is a day of sleet and freezing rain? What good, for that matter, is the vast emptiness that is almost the totality of outer space? It is necessary to have this emptiness, this nothingness, this pause, for without it, everything would burn out, from crammed solar systems to crammed lives. For most of us, we are only in this space when ill. It is the price we pay for thinking our personal worlds mean more than they do. Even if it is not worth the price personally, however – even if the illness or the trauma is too great to bear - the universe knows that it must be. And that is why the deepest among us have long said that mercy is behind and beneath it all, for sickness and suffering is required for the health of the soul. For such a creation to lack pity – and mercy – would be to make of it a flock of instinct-driven chickens who could not create a tear, never mind a universe.
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