Something I Know About What I Do Not Yet Know

I posted this on my Facebook wall yesterday: “If one hopes to become good at something, one must first be willing to spend some time being not-so-good. If one wants to be strong, one must begin in weakness.”  I wrote it from a position of weakness, of not-so-goodness, and of hope.

Wednesday night I set out to run for 30 minutes straight.  I had recently run 20 minutes non-stop.  I had run 30 minutes total with brief breaks.  But 30 minutes without stopping was going to be a milestone.  It was hard.  20-some minutes in, I really wanted to stop.  In hindsight, I probably should have stopped.  My calf was bothering me some, but that was only part of the problem.  The other part was that I was tired.  I felt like I had been running for a very, very long time.  Uninvited, the thought popped to mind that not two years ago I had run for a little under four hours when I ran the Lost Dutchman Marathon.  I have twice run Chicago in around three hours and forty-five minutes.  I have run, therefore, for more than 220 minutes on multiple occasions, and yet, running for half an hour felt like an eternity. The contrast felt demoralizing.  Now, two days later, my right leg still has not recovered.  I have fallen so far.  I am still broken.

But yesterday was the ten month anniversary of my spine surgery, which means that a little less than ten months ago, I was struggling to walk in circles around the first floor of my house for a few minutes at a time.  When I was finally able to walk for more than ten minutes at a time and graduated myself to the walking track at the gym, I had to relearn how to use my right leg and how to keep my right foot pointing straight ahead of me.  I had to relearn how to use my right calf muscle and then to regrow that muscle, a process that seems still to be in progress.  And I am definitely not done regrowing the nerve that controls the outside of my right leg and foot.  I have made enormous progress.  I have been persistent and patient and brave. It’s all a matter of perspective. 

To distract myself from my tiredness and calf pain, I thought about a book I recently read called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.  The first section of the book focuses on the biology of learning a skill, specifically the myelination of nerves that occurs when they are fired repeatedly.  Each firing causes a little more myelin to grow and each layer of myelin refines and speeds up the nerve impulse.  The book proposes, therefore, that all great talent begins as not-great talent that has been refined by hours and hours of practice.  Current research shows that “expert” status at any skill is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice.  The most powerful moment in the book, for me, pointed out that in order to be great at anything, you have to slog through thousands of hours of being not-great at that thing.  Everyone who is good at something now was once not good at it.  Ability is not something we are handed on a silver platter. Ever. 

Of course, the book was not at all about people who have nerve damage or a perpetually broken foot, but it speaks to me in many other ways.  It’s OK to spend a long time learning how to run again.  More powerfully, it reminds me not to be afraid of other pursuits either. I haven’t written anything of note because I just haven’t put in the time.  The Bronte sisters, according to Coyle, spent decades writing complete crap with hokey dialogue and stolen plots before they wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Just because I have never become good at piano does not mean that someday I might not still take it up again and, after a long, long, long time, be good at it.  I could, in theory, start either of these practices tomorrow.  The reality is that I won’t, given that I don’t even have time to sleep lately, but the possibility is always there.  I can become better at cooking, better at teaching, better at singing, better at anything.  So can my students.  So can my children. The future is bigger than I can imagine and full of possibilities, some of which I don’t even know to consider yet. I need only be willing to be not-so-good, to be weak, to be wrong, to make mistakes, and to keep trying.

Playing as a Team

This fall I have had the privilege of being assistant coach for a terrific soccer team of fourth graders. I don't believe I can take credit for what makes them good. For one thing, I'm not the main coach. I have thought of a drill here or there, and I have conversations with the kids on the sidelines during the game. I organized a team outing to see the high school soccer team, but only a portion of the team even showed up. No, I think what makes the team so much better than it was last spring is that it plays like a team. Last spring there were a few kids who played hard, a few stand-outs, and everyone else sort of wandered around the field and only occassionally took a swipe at the ball. When you are a motivated and talented player assigned to be left forward and you know that the kid playing center defense couldn't care less about winning the ball from the opponent, you are going to linger back in the center defense position when the other team has the ball, just in case. Then when the ball is where the left forward should be, no one is there. Furthermore, the kid assigned to center defense learns that he doesn't really have to try for the ball because someone else will come do it anyway. It makes for a lot of losses, a lot of discouraged players, and a painful watching experience.

This year, every kid on the team is really trying. Of course they still have varying abilities since all you have to do to be on the team is sign up, but the fact that everyone is putting forth their best effort in the games liberates everyone to play their positions. This year we have a lot of motivated players. Even better though, the players all know that their teammates are not going to back down either, so they don't feel the need (although they still do occasionally get carried away) to be way out of position all of the time. We actually won a few games because when the ball went up towards the offense, the entire offense was there to take it up to the goal! Amazing! I think the kids have learned that everyone wins when anyone on the team scores a goal, and everyone is willing to play their own part regardless of what that part is.

I was thinking about this teamwork idea as I was driving home from work, later than usual, yesterday afternoon. A student had needed to discuss something with me, and I had said of course I could talk. So I was later than usual on Halloween. I had also missed the afternoon Halloween parade at the elementary school because of my afternoon class. I was exhausted because I have had a really hard week trying to finish up grading research papers and plan for a very difficult and nebulous unit that started yesterday, just after I collected the next round of papers. And on top of that, we had a math meeting on Tuesday night, and I had a church council meeting on Wednesday night. The nerve in my right leg is bothering me again, so I'm in a bit of pain too. I've not been getting much sleep or much exercise. And, worst, I've not been a very involved mom. And there it was, Halloween. I had missed pumpkin carving the night before. I had missed one of the two parades that day. My mom had picked up Gretchen from the school bus and gone to the parade at the school. Then she had taken Gretchen to a party at the nursing home. Doug had picked up Adam from school. Both of my kids had fantastic costumes--breathtaking, really--but my mom made one of them and Doug made the other. And I was driving home after 4pm on Halloween! For a moment I felt panic. What if my mom didn't get Gretchen off the bus? What if Doug didn't pick up Adam? But I realized that was silly. My mom gets Gretchen off the bus twice a week. And Doug poured so many hours into that costume that he was absolutely not going to forget that it was Halloween and that I had sent a note to school about Adam not riding the bus. He is a terrific dad. So I shifted from panic to sadness. My mom and husband are better parents than I am, or so it felt.

But then I considered why I was sad. Did my kids miss out on anything? Not really. They still carved the pumpkins. Their costumes were much better than if I had made either one. Gretchen had me and my dad at her costume parade, and Adam had my mom and Gretchen at his. They have been fed and gotten their homework done and taken showers. They are safe and comfortable and seem fairly happy and well-adjusted.

My problem, then, was not on behalf of my children but was born out of my inclination to play all of the positions on the field at once. On Halloween, there are goals to be scored on the homefront, and I didn't run up and score them. What I need to remember, though, is that I am playing on a team of excellent players, all of whom also care about the game. My mom and my husband made unbelievably fantastic costumes. They flawlessly executed the logistics of getting everyone safely to and from where they needed to be. So yesterday afternoon, my assigned position was at the college where I teach, and I did that. And everyone was OK. Happy even. A win, really.

I could learn from my team of nine-year-olds. It doesn't matter who scores the goal. As long as someone is scoring and someone is playing defense, the whole team wins.

 

Car Tattoo

A couple of years ago, my husband suggested that we get some sort of sticker/magnet for the back of our minivan so the kids could distinguish it more easily from all of the other vans that look exactly like it. I said that was fine. But then I never got one.

When we were hiking this summer, a friend and I had a conversation about why I don't have any tattoos when I profess to want one. It comes down to, in the end, not a fear of the tattoo itself, but a holding back, a reluctance to permanently mark on my body that this one thing is so central to my being that I’m willing to advertise it with my very skin.  For the rest of my life.  I have considered the Christian fish symbol, because the Kingdom of God is something I think I really believe in, or want to really believe in, and to me the Kingdom is what the story of the loaves and the fishes is about. It's an illustration of what the Kingdom is like. Jesus doesn't agree with his disciples that the kindest thing to do for the crowds is to send them off to a place where they can get dinner, although the disciples mean this as compassion. No, He says, "You feed them." The Kingdom is like that: no half way. YOU. FEED. THEM. And miraculously, there was enough food. In the Kingdom, there is enough. Is there enough because God miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes or because under the influence of the here's-everything-we-have-laid-out-for-you way of living, others put forth everything they had as well? Either way, it's wonderful. So I have thought about getting that fish somewhere.

But I haven't.

Unfortunately, that fish has been co-opted to mean other things. It's been used as a symbol of the argument between Christians and atheists, and between creationists and evolution. It's come to be associated with a type of person that I am not. And even if it meant to everyone exactly the sort of faith I want it to mean, I'd feel inadequate to have it on me. I slip and fall and fall away and doubt and blatantly sin, and tattooing myself with that symbol seems presumptuous and like it sends the wrong message. I worry it would seem to proclaim not what I hope to be but what I am already. I'd hate to boast before the world of my piety when that piety is not always controlling my behavior. Perhaps I overthink, but a tattoo is a matter worthy of much consideration, in my opinion. I am still considering getting a tattoo somewhere I would see it but that would be unobtrusive to the general public, as a sort of reminder. But I haven't figured out what that spot would be. Inside of the wrist?

So back to the van. Less permanent, but more public.  Echoes of the same issues. What do I believe in enough to drive around in front of it every day? I find far too many things on people's mini-vans and SUVs to be annoyingly self-congratulatory. Those “26.2” stickers, for example. Or worse, multiple race distance stickers. I have run marathons, but I would be terribly embarrassed to proclaim it to everyone I met, even though I am not embarrassed to have done it. Just, what is the point? “Hi stanger: I ran five marathons!! Did you?” Some people have run longer and faster, so who am I to boast? Some cannot run marathons. Heck, I probably cannot run marathons anymore, so would that “26.2” magnet be a lie? Would it inspire anyone, or would it just be there to show off? How many people would see a 26.2 sticker and think, "Hey, I should run a marathon!"? And if it’s there to remind me of what I’ve done, should I put a sticker on the back of my car that I have a master's degree? How horrid would that be? Or how about a "Magna cum laude!" sticker? How about, “I gave birth without drugs!!”  What else could I put on there to remind myself (and others, since it won’t be inside my car but on the bumper, which I rarely see) that I’m awesome?  Maybe some people ought to put their seven-digit salaries on the backs of their cars. Or maybe people should have a tally of how many hours they have spent volunteering in homeless shelters and food banks. I have a little more tolerance for the stickers that illustrate the people in the family, but not enough more to actually do it. Who but me cares, really, that I have two kids?  I have friends with four kids.  I know of people who had kids accidentally. I have a few friends who desperately wish they had one. Would that little stick family bring anything worthwhile to the people driving behind me? I guess people would claim these things are just self-expression of what is important in their lives. Well, OK. I can accept that your family is where your heart is. I'm not sure why you need to advertize your heart on the back of your SUV, but OK. (Just don't start adding a list of all of your family's accomplishments too.) To that end, I almost agreed to go with some version of "Swim, bike, run." My sticker would not specify that I won second in my age group at a small Olympic Distance triathlon one year. Just that those are things I love. And, come to think of it, I would recommend them to most people on some level. Maybe "be outside" would be better, but I never came across one of those.

 

Then on vacation this summer I spotted some magnets from an organization called We Add Up. Their slogan is "No one can do everything. Everyone can do something." I liked their car magnets. I almost bought one that said, "Be the change." Then I saw it hiding behind a “peace” magnet: the car magnet I've been waiting for.

 

The back of my minivan now features a brown magnet with a picture of a smiling worm and the word "compost."

 

There it is. It makes me laugh.  I love the way it turns the car magnet culture around a little.  More importantly, though, here is the something I can drive around in front of every day of my life. Composting is amazing! We've had a compost bin for a few years now, and it has never filled up!!! Seriously!  I have put every single vegetable and fruit scrap from every meal I’ve made or eaten in my house in that bin, and it still isn’t full!! The pile grows all winter, until I think, “Oh, we’re finally going to need a second bin,” and then all summer it gradually decomposes and melts down into nothing: into thick rich dirt that I spread around in my garden a shovelful at a time. (A year’s worth of vegetable and fruit scraps in a vegetarian household produces only a shovelful or two per year!  It’s amazing, I tell you!) Composting takes something that could be terribly harmful and makes it into something amazingly helpful. It makes it into delightful flowers and delicious homegrown vegetables that feed my family without use of fossil fuel to transport them.  (You feed them, He said.  Here.  With what you already have.) Even better, composting is as easy as throwing things in the garbage, which everyone has to do anyway.  Anyone could do this amazing thing for the planet (and save on garbage fees) with almost no additional time or energy!  Why doesn’t everyone compost?

 

Ah, maybe they don’t know about composting.  Maybe they don’t know where to start or who to ask.  Maybe they don’t realize it’s really important.  Until now.

 

Now my car magnet boldly proclaims to the world (or all of it that drives behind me in my little suburban town and parks next to me at the grocery store) that I BELIEVE in COMPOST!  I believe. 

 

The tattoo parlor may be next.

The things we lose

I often think about how fragile all of life is. One day you are a competitive triathlete, the next, bam! your foot is broken for the rest of your life. One day you wake up early to exercise, sneeze(!), and then can't move at all for weeks/months and find yourself a season and a half later wearing a compression corset and not even allowed to do laundry. Or you are driving home from work, and someone else is tired or on their phone, and all of life is over. Then there is my grandma, who has rapidly progressing dementia and was transferred to a nursing home yesterday. Once obsessively neat and somewhat over-involved to the point of nosiness, she has lost the ability even to know what to do in the bathroom or when to wake up. She will soon forget how to swallow. In her dementia she has said things I know the real Grandma would regret and has damaged the relationships with her children. My mom has lost her mother. Sooner or later, quickly or slowly, we all lose everything we think we own, everything we think we are. What you have today is a gift, and it could be gone tomorrow, or even later today. When I was a teenager, my grandpa thought I was unnecessarily dark for thinking things like this. And yes, these things are sad, but they are also true. I think such thoughts are both dark and light. I think most people could do with a bit of reverence for what they have and appreciation of the fact that it is temporary. All of it.

However, maybe my grandpa's point was that there is such a thing as taking the fragility awareness too far. My kids cried themselves to sleep last night. This is perhaps the sort of thing that bothered my grandpa. They weren't crying about my grandma, as that is almost too big for them to understand. They were crying about an eighty-five cent piece of rubber.

Adam won the coloring contest at school yesterday. He was enormously pleased. This makes two years in a row of coloring victories for him, and we take our victories where we can get them. Adam doesn't spill everything that goes on in his day like some kids do, but yesterday he came home so happy he was babbling. He did well on the Wordmasters competition, and his classmates had voted his coloring the best for the second year in a row. He gave me the blow by blow on the voting and how Heidi was a close second with only two votes less than him, how time had been called when he still had one section left to color, how someone knocked over a water bottle on his prize-winning work and how the teacher had hung it to dry and inadvertently torn a little piece of the paper in doing so. The prize was a little rubber duck in an innertube. He told me everything imaginable about this duck: how one girl had wanted to pet it because it was so cute even though it was made of rubber and who wants to pet rubber?, how it had acquired its name (Squeaks,) what the other choices had been and why he had chosen as he did. He made each of us guess the name, even after we had heard the previous guesses. He played with it all evening. He wanted it to eat dinner with him outside on the deck. I don't allow toys at the table, but he was so enamored of this duck, and it was rubber, and we were eating outside for the first time, so I said OK. Gretchen went upstairs and got a rubber duck to eat with her too. As soon as they were done eating, the kids got up and were dancing around the deck throwing their ducks in the air and catching them. Then they started to see how high they could throw them. About a minute before it happened, I thought in my head, "I hope that doesn't go on the roof." I decided that no, Adam would be smarter than that. Nope. He threw it up, and it didn't come down. He turned and caught my eye, and when my face confirmed that yes, the duck was gone, his face crumpled and he started to cry. Oh well, we told him, maybe it will come down in a hard rain. (I don't think it will.) We don't have a ladder long enough to reach the second story, and even if we did, I'm not sure we would risk climbing on the roof for a rubber duck. Life is fragile, remember.

Adam was a mess the rest of the night. Gretchen kept trying to make him feel better by fetching his other rubber ducks. (By the way, I didn't realize that Adam has a rubber duck collection, of sorts. What?) Finally Adam said he didn't want all of his toys downstairs and please stop. So she did. But she kept bringing up to Adam how sorry she was about Squeaks, how sad it was, how much she missed him too. Then Adam would start off crying again. Finally I suggested to Gretchen that she just not bring it up any more because it was making Adam sad to keep thinking about it. Then she started to cry because she had made Adam feel worse. She wouldn't stop crying either. So by the time they were in bed, both kids were sobbing, one because "I just miss Squeaks so much!" and the other because she had wanted so badly to help with the grief and had made it worse.

Sometimes it helps to move our minds away from the true tragedies to the ones we can hold in our hands (or throw on the roof.) We all went to bed last night somber at the thought of how quickly and thoroughly joy can transform into sorrow, the fullness of having into the hole of loss. We woke up to blossoms on the crab-apple tree but know that winter will come again soon enough. How fortunate for us, though, who once had grandparents who took us camping and taught us to play pool. How fortunate we went and learned when we could. How wonderful to have won the contest, how fun were those hours of victory. And how lucky for us, now, to be watched over by a little duck who reminds us to handle with care the treasures of today.

Another Lesson on Lessening

This afternoon found me making sugar cookie dough (to make into shamrock cookies later) while my son "played" with his microscope. We looked up rotifers on the internet because he was looking at some prepared slides, and then we looked at salt and sugar and human hair and paper and a piece of carrot that I hadn't cleaned off the table after Adam ate lunch. (Do the benefits of doing nothing never end?) Playing with his microscope was Adam's idea, as was what he is now doing: shooting baskets out on the driveway in full winter gear amid the occasional snow flurries. Several times while looking at things he didn't understand, Adam said, "I really like this microscope,” and “I like the cross section slides the best.” That kid can make me more furious than anyone has since my sister grew up, but he also can be source of pure delight and wonder. I am here to take a teensy bit of credit for that, in a sort of negative way. I think the magic of this afternoon was more about what I did not do than what I did.

Not long ago a friend who also has a third grader remarked that I am good at fostering my children's ability to play imaginatively. I have been thinking about whether or not this is true. I was good at imaginative play when I was young, but I am not particularly good at it now. I read to my kids. Mostly, though, I do nothing in particular to make them play as they do, with microscopes and legos, inventing new board games and "talking" their various little animals and cars, making up songs and putting on shows, organizing and reorganizing football cards, making obscure (and extremely non-representational) artwork out of pipe cleaners and tape and markers and then "selling" their art in a "grocery store". So today, when I watched my son engaged in an act of spontaneous inquiry, I thought about how such a thing came about. I haven't mentioned his microscope, well, ever. In fact, I had forgotten that he had received one from his grandparents on his 8th birthday.

Although it's far too easy to forget it as I plan which summer camps and classes my children will attend in the next couple of months, as everyone I know with a third-grade boy frets about which baseball team he will be on this spring, as I listen to parents discuss who is in the advanced and enriched program and as the school administers standardized tests, my accidental secret to raising kids who come up with their own imaginary games and come downstairs with their microscope and say, "Can I do this now?" is to do nothing.

Nothing. An afternoon in which we didn't go anywhere. We didn't have any athletic events. We didn't invite anyone over or fill up the house with false stimuli in the form of TV or video games (since we don't really own a usable version of either.) After lunch, Gretchen needed a nap, and I lay down on the couch with a book, and Adam roamed about for a few minutes until he saw his microscope in his closet. That's it. That's my secret. I was doing nothing.

Nothing is pretty darn easy, I must say. I was dozing off, in fact. But nothing also takes courage and practice. I will confess that on this chilly damp Saturday, I had two back-up plans: a lego train exhibit at the library and a parade. And maybe I would have made us do one if not both if Gretchen had not clearly needed a nap after spending the night with my mom last night. And it was with reservations that I canceled both plans in favor of what my kids really needed: down time. Living in a wonderful community, as we do, where on any given weekend there are dozens of fun and/or educational activities and facilities available, the temptation is to think that if we aren't out soaking up as much stimulation as possible, I am not being the absolute best parent. But the truth of parenting is more complicated than that.

I am not advocating parents doing nothing ever. My children are generally well behaved because I am intentional and constant in ensuring they are. I try to expose them to a variety of activities and cultural events. Tomorrow we have one thing after another: church followed by birthday party followed by basketball game. My son plays a sport pretty much every season and takes piano lessons, and my daughter takes a dance class and a gymnastics class. But starting when my son was a toddler and we started to sign up for little park district classes and sports and preschool, I carefully guarded one day a week to not sign up for anything. I had an instinct that there was something as valuable about time alone as there is in engagement. I now have a day of the week when my daughter has nothing, and as much as she looks forward to Mondays because of ballet and Thursdays because of gymnastics, and as much as she enjoys preschool, she also celebrates Tuesday because she can hang around and play in her pajamas and doesn't get rushed off anywhere when she is in the middle of an imaginary drama. It isn't that all of the other things my children are signed up for are not wonderful and valuable experiences for them, it's just that I must remind myself to hold back a bit, to worry less about cramming everything into one short childhood and occasionally let what they are learning in their structured activities blossom into something that is their own. And instead of feeling guilty that I sometimes need some downtime myself, I need to remember that it's OK to say that I am going to read for a bit, or cook, or sweep the floor. It's OK to not be constantly playing with or transporting or teaching my children. Sometimes--OK, often--they are far better at engaging themselves in meaningful play and learning than any adult could be.

I need to remember this and remember to occasionally lie on the couch. Sometimes the best of everything that I can offer my children is less of everything.

"And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you arenot able to do so small thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?" --Luke 12:25-26

Fat Tuesday, but only technically

 

I don't think I've ever in my life been ready for Lent, and I suppose in some sense that is not surprising. Who can keep up with God? But this year it did at least occur to me a day in advance. I woke up this morning knowing it was Fat Tuesday. I had actually already thought about feasting on fat things; however, I spent most of yesterday in narcotics withdrawal, and I didn't think eating crazy amounts of chocolate or even a meal with meat was a good idea on an uncertain stomach. I had a cookie or two that a friend had brought me. To splurge and celebrate my new-found ability to sit in the car for ten minutes, we ate out. I had a vegetable stir fry: broccoli, carrots, peppers and rice. Living large, I am. We thought about going out for dessert afterwards, but it was cold out and the only dessert places around served ice cream, so I came home and made brownies. Then I ate one. Yes, that is how I live it up around here, one week post-surgery.

More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.

What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.

One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.

It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.

Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.

In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.

And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.

What's happening

Yesterday I saw the second of two neurosurgeons. I had been advised that in such matters as neurosurgery, it's best to seek out at least two opinions. I suppose the good news is that both surgeons said pretty much the same thing: I need surgery, and the sooner the better. I have a severely herniated disk at L5-S1. According to yesterday's doctor, it's about as bad as a herniation gets. It's filling up about half of my spinal column. We joked a bit yesterday with the doctor that I've always been something of an over-achiever and so I wanted to have the very best herniation he'd ever seen. Good for me. Seriously, though, it is, for some reason, helpful to have my pain validated. Yes, this is as bad as this type of pain gets. It really is. So I truly am doing well to not be a wailing pile of mess, and I've been bearing up remarkably well for having been in this condition for several weeks.

Both surgeons are able to get me into surgery on Tuesday. It's not a herniation to mess around with. If they operate soon, there is still a good chance that I could regain full use of that nerve and therefore full use of my right leg which, of course, is important to me. The surgery involves a fairly small (not much larger than an inch) incision in my back. The doctor will then peel the muscles off of the spinal column and keep them retracted and out of the way. Here is where my athletic physique will cost me a bit. If those muscles were weak and atrophied, it would hurt less. Mine, however, are robust and meaty and will HURT. Even so, better to have them hurt than be cut. The doctor will have to drill a little hole in the lamina of my vertebrae in order to get to the nerves, which will be pushed aside, and the disk, the extruded part of which will be cut into pieces and removed. The doctor will then look around with his tools and microscope and make sure he isn't leaving any fragments, and then put in layer upon layer of dissolving stitches and close me up. Done.

I have decided to go with the second doctor, although it was a hard decision because both seemed very good. The second doctor was more thorough in how he spoke to us, although both seemed knowledgable and confident. He also put more emphasis on the non-surgical aspects, like physical therapy, and he already has a connection with the physical therapist I've been seeing and whose professional knowledge I trust. He also was very adamant about the need for an overnight stay in the hospital after the surgery, whereas the other doctor was going to send me home same day. For spine surgery, that seems ambitious. And it's a lot of responsibility to put on Doug. Lastly, he is closer and uses the hospital that is only two miles from our house.

So that's the plan: surgery on Tuesday, home on Wednesday, beginning a gradual walking plan in the first week (walks measured in minutes at first) and physical therapy after the second week. I have a few more days of this kind of pain, a few days of surgical pain, and then I should start to see the pain go down. I almost cannot imagine life without pain. I'm willing to try it.

Reasons to be thankful

In the last few days I've talked to two different friends who are down. I've been down before. This fall I was in therapy for major depression, until a few weeks ago when I became unable to sit for even a few minutes, much less an hour. I thought at the time that most of my depression could be traced back to my chronic injuries and my inability to run. However, since then, I have lost not only the ability to run but also the ability to bike, to swim, to walk further than from one room to another in my own house, to sit down to dinner, to ride in the car (and since I cannot walk either, basically I've lost the ability to leave my house,) to go to church, to be in the band, to participate in choir, to teach, to sit at a computer, to put on my own socks, to tie my own shoes, to get my hair cut, etc. Basically, I've lost the ability to do anything not involving lying on the couch. Or in bed. And sometimes it hurts too much sleep, so that's out too.

This should all be very depressing. Yes, it hurts enough sometimes that I cry and moan. Sometimes I am quite grumpy with my family due to the pain. But I don't believe that I am depressed at the moment. Odd.

I should probably provide a disclaimer before I go any further. I am scheduled to have surgery on Tuesday. It's spine surgery. It requires general anesthesia and a neurosurgeon and some expensive and high-tech equipment. And yes, I am a bit nervous about that. But the surgeon seems quite confident that this surgery will fix my pain. Perhaps some of my depression cynicism reemerges for a moment when I think of that, but I quash it pretty quickly. On the whole, I tend to believe that after Tuesday, or maybe after Wednesday or Thursday, I will start to feel better and that my life will return more or less to normal in a couple of months. Therefore, what I am about to say I believe I can only say because I believe that this pain is nearing an end.

That said, if I somehow had the secret power to go back in time and magically cure my back before it ever got to this point, I'm not sure that I would. I feel oddly grateful (now that I know an end is near) for this interlude from normal life. Yes, it's incredibly painful and debilitating. Yes, it's scary. But it's also been a very interesting experience. Just as I do not for a second regret having done natural childbirth, I wouldn't sacrifice this experience just to get rid of the memory of the pain. The memory will fade, after all.

I confessed to a friend that I feel grateful for this time, and she asked why. I've been trying to figure out just what it is. The pain itself is very purifying, I think. There is something about horrible pain that makes one blind to trivialities. When the goal for the day--or the hour, if a whole day is too much to contemplate--is just to survive it, suddenly things like bad hair and gained weight, lack of productivity and a clutter-filled house just aren't that important. I don't feel anxious that I haven't exercised because, quite frankly, I can think of nothing I want to do less. I want to lie on the couch, find a position that hurts only a bearable amount, and not move from it until I can get up for another dose of narcotics. When the pain is intense, I want to be alone with it in a quiet place and breathe into it and live it and honor it and bless it and make it holy. It is, for me at least, a spiritual experience. Plus, I also had the chance during the last couple of weeks to read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World, both of which have helped me live my pain fully and with as much grace as possible.

Being visibly in pain and more confined and for a longer stretch than most people have to be with an illness or injury has also brought to me the blessing of compassion. I may not be on anyone's fun list, but I certainly have been well taken care of. My husband has been carrying the load not only of paying the bills but also picking up a good deal of the child care. And the wife care. He helps me put on my pajamas, drives me to physical therapy, and has been unfailingly patient. My sister Katy came over one week and took down and put away all of my Christmas decorations. She vacuumed up the fallen needles and my stairs while the vacuum was out. She dragged the tree out to the street--ordinarily Doug's job, but she did it herself. The next week she came and scrubbed my kitchen floor, something that made me breathe easier and really needed to be done, as my back has been hurt since last spring. My mom has driven my daughter to ballet and cleaned her room. She had me spend the weekend a few weeks ago and waited on me hand and foot, literally, as one of the favors I asked was for her to pull on my foot to take pressure off my spine. When she hosted my birthday dinner, she arranged it so that people stood at the counter with me so that I didn't have to eat my birthday dinner alone. My friend Jen came over and taught me to knit and brought me some DVDs of her favorite TV series and some chocolate. Another friend volunteered to take Adam to baseball practice every week, and a neighbor is going to take Gretchen to preschool while I am with a neurosurgeon. Even though I am not currently much fun, not a good runner, not a good musician, not a good housekeeper or mom, really not a good anything, I feel as beloved as I ever have. I have nothing to offer to others, but I still feel valued. What a remarkable gift.

Talking to my friend tonight on the phone I began to wonder if perhaps I am also feeling oddly mentally OK because this has been, if nothing else, a time off. Not a time away. I didn't get to run the relay in Florida I had intended to do, and I keep missing out on shows and outings, but it has been a break from, well, everything. An enforced break, but apparently I, like most women, need it to be enforced if it's to happen. This has been a time set apart. Apart for pain, yes, but still apart, for me and about me. Although I have not yet begun to heal physically, I think that time by itself has helped my soul heal from the wounds of daily living. If all goes well, I hope to come out of this with a renewed sense of perspective, a revised outlook on life, a fresh start.