So, picking up on what I said last time, knowing that things are broken while they are temporarily whole can be one key to inspiring compassion, equanimity, and can reduce our attachments enough to send us further outside ourselves, toward helping other people, as well as to our own creative life. When there is less “stuff’ between you and your heart, everyone can share in its size.
Like the things we own, the beliefs we have, the versions of loved ones we want to remain in place, we too are made to change, here to move, to be cherished even as they break, and change.
Imperfection is imbedded in the forms we both enjoy and fear. Again, to know this could give us strength rather than a desire to hold on even tighter.
Zen Master Yunmen limped painfully for the remainder of his life, having injured his leg while trying to prevent the door to the monastery to which he wished to enter from being shut in his face yet again. Here too, persistence came with a price, yet for Yunmen, that price included acceptance into the monastery as well as physical challenges.
When your body starts or stops acting in ways you took for granted, or relied on, it is like meeting a new person everyday, becoming new hour by hour. That constant change is part of all of our lives, influenced by moods, experiences, memories, cellular and other internal processes.
Chronic illness gives us no choice but to pay attention; it can also give one an opportunity as well. We can meet those changes, those constant new bodies which are really just one body, of course.
“Meeting” that new body is another way of acceptance of that body as it is, working with it in each moment in the best way you can. Sometimes that means stopping what you are doing and going to bed for awhile. Sometimes it means taking a few minutes to catch your breath, or reach for whatever medication you take that can give relief.
Daily we carry and, in a sense, meet, the many fragments of unformed selves, past selves, selves spared or which endured our life’s traumas and joys. There are an infinite number of these “bodies” inside us. Yet outside of us and our conditions, we can see ourselves, or would-be selves in others. Empathy deepens the more we regard all those fragmented pieces of ourselves that are constantly changing, being added to or healed, or understood, or embraced. Acceptance of ourselves is the achy onset of empathy.
Here acceptance, like empathy can become compassion. Compassion for ourselves is harder than it can be for another; a weakened but understood body recognizes the weakened bodies of others and understands. I daresay we are all wounded, weakened, when compared to who or what we compare ourselves.
Of course, death is the ultimate meeting ground and release point for all those bodies in and around us. Healthy or health-challenged, we do know how this story in this lifetime ends. Often the presence of death tips the scales in favor of compassion, though they can be shocking and devastating times. A funeral home is an awkward but rich place for seeing suffering, and for seeing it as our own. A room full of grieving people, waiting in line to view the body of their loved ones; we also wait there in line for our own moment. Sobering and perhaps morbid, but moments that shock you into realization and acceptance of truth are precious moments, whether through the heroic roar of Yunmen, or the quiet witness of the loved one in repose.
This past week I lost three people from among my extended family.
I lost an uncle, who had for years lived in another part of the country, so I hadn’t been in touch with him for some time, though I would get news from his children. His mobility and dependence long curtailed yet surrounded by family who took care of him and continued to enjoy his humor and love of life. He was with me when the Red Sox came to life in Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS, and one afternoon he guided me through the parts of the car engine, which never seemed to make sense to me.
My 93-year-old neighbor had been going downhill fast, and though his decline in mobility and independence was galling to his fiery spirit, he never lost his humor nor his sharp mind, one that shared with me his ideas on history, art, politics, travel, in great conversations right up until the end. My wife and I had the pleasure of sharing Christmas Eve dinner with him, as he was not able to join his family. That already grateful and rich memory will carry extra importance for us in the holidays to come.
A much younger and healthier spirit also passed away this week, a woman who, though in her early 40s, was a grandmother a few times over, and was the fierce but generous matriarch who was a touchstone for so many. Both young and old benefitted from her joy and positivity, traits that make her, and all those around her, feeling immortal when in the full light of their power.
She and I belonged to the same church youth group many years ago. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I would often hear stories about her or see her social media posts, the way they keep in contact with these days with those who live far from us, or who have grown further distant in the natural and unnatural events that mark changes in friendships.
A couple of relatively obscure books may help provide insight into what I’ve so clumsily been talking about.
Coffinman: the Journal of a Buddhist Mortician, by Shinman Aoki, whose subject is a pretty self-explanatory, offers candid and irreverent insight into the lessons learned while caring for the dead on a daily basis. Through this job that estranges him from some due to its “uncleanliness,” Aoki relates moments of exasperation, genuine sorrow, and many of the various ways people cope with the loss of someone.
More misanthropic is Shiro Oyama’s “a man without talents,” the notes of a Japanese day laborer and Pure Land practitioner. A life among those bodies which society chooses to ignore or with whom to share only disgust, Oyama tells hard tales of hard people who keep a running pecking order as much as more “fortunate” ones. He is not afraid to speak of enjoying life on the streets, nor or the fears and self-disgust that also arises. The streets, like the funeral home, is a place of deeply and messy human emotion, one too where humanity has few of the normal distractions that normally keep us at arm’s length from pain and recognition of others’ pain.