March 16, 2024
A welcome somnolence envelops me. Just sitting and being, without feeling subliminally driven, is an experience of wonderment. I feel like I’m melting into the chair, while Brownie purrs on my lap and Fluffy radiates happy tranquility nearby. Our contentment might power the City of Angels if only we knew how to tap it.
I’ve spent the last nine years sealed within a game of pain. An image appears: a vintage arcade game with knobs and levers, where the pinball ricochets from side to side, artfully controlled by the master of the game. The pinball never escapes the enclosure, but shoots eagerly to every corner, perhaps imagining it’s going to bust through one of those walls and zing its way to freedom.
Only now that the game has been decommissioned, the enclosure pulverized to dust, do I realize how trapped I was. How limited. And how narrow was my focus every moment, every day. No matter what I seemed to be doing, feeling, or thinking, I was perpetually seeking an internal answer to one simple question: How do I stop this pain?
*****
Yesterday I walked to the end of the block and back, accompanied by the physical therapist. The cane in my left hand tapped gently against the pavement, offloading just enough pressure to mitigate a lingering right hip twinge. “By this time next week, you’re not going to need the cane,” the therapist observed.
An aspect of my human birthright that I’d almost forgotten—moving comfortably and freely—strengthens within me at an accelerating pace. It’s two weeks and two days post-surgery and I’m looking forward to walking, walking, walking. Laps around the strolling path in the backyard, or to the end of the block and beyond. The cane taps its message of reassurance. While you need me, I am here.
*****
What was the prolonged message of the pain? Were the secrets of the universe supposed to be revealed while I was trapped within that wicked pinball machine, futilely, furiously, attempting to escape?
The escape route I finally took, hip replacement surgery, has always been available. In the waiting room at the surgeon’s office, another patient commented, “I don’t know why I waited so long to do this,” echoing what I’ve heard from many others.
Why do any of us accept physical conditions that we know we could mitigate? Why do we indulge in addictions to food or alcohol, drugs or cigarettes? Or let chronic pain linger for years when we know there’s a nearly sure, largely safe cure via surgery?
Do we want to cause ourselves illness or disability? While an addiction creates misery, don’t we also receive something from it? The food tastes good, the cigarette is a reliable companion. Physical pain can narrow our world to the absolute essentials, paring away the extraneous as surely as taking the vow of an anchorite.
From a spiritual perspective, it seems possible that we’re wending our way through one grand, final karmic maze, drawing the cards for pain, misery, self-reproach, guilt…life experiences deemed necessary by our mysterious, all-knowing souls.
The life lessons from nine years of chronic pain must’ve been very subtle, since I can’t grasp what they were. My nurse friend, L, told me, “Every single one of your recovery days has tremendous value.” Perhaps the same is true of every single one of those now-vanished days of pain.
The cats have shifted and moved to sit in the sun, which crept in through the windows as the morning wore on. It’s time to amble around the strolling path. The sun strengthens. And I, feeling it on my face, absorb its brilliant energy.
