sight

i met my first patient yesterday in los angeles, let's call him ira. he lost his vision last week. and he's taking it hard.

having worked with actively dying people in the past, one of the things that i have sensed is the greatest problem for them is the loss of agency in their lives. as their bodies get sicker, and they lose various physical abilities, they start to lose the freedoms that we build around those abilities. ira can't walk; now he can't see. he thinks that his life is over. and it almost is, but it's not quite over yet.

but he, completely understandably, feels very isolated. this is his first christmas away from him family. they are going to come for breakfast (he has a large family with children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren -- and his father is still alive!) but it's not the same. he speaks fondly of last year, and even of last week when he could see, and he cries through non-seeing eyes.

i want to try to make him realize that there are ways for him to learn to deal with his blindness and still be happy. but he's dying. of cancer. he knows it. if he weren't dying, we wouldn't be there. how do you find the strength to bother to learn to relive when you know you have very little time left to live?

so, we sat and talked. and he cried. it's not the same. he doesn't want me there. he wants his sight back. i'm a pretty miserable subsitute.

daily dharma: When the Iron Eagle Flies
Ayya Khema

It will not be persuaded by any pleading of misery to let go of us. If we say to a human teacher, "I don't feel well . . .," the teacher may reply, "I am very sorry, but if you want to go home, then you must go." If we say to dukkha, "Look, I don't feel well . . . I want to go home," dukkha says, "That's fine, but I am coming along." There is no way to say goodbye to it unless and until we have transcended our reactions. This means that we have looked dukkha squarely in the eye and see it for what it is: a universal characteristic of existence and nothing else. The reason we are fooled is that because this lfe contains so many pleasant occasions and sense contacts, we think if we could just keep this pleasantness going dukkha would never come again. We try over and over again to make this happen, until in the end we finally see that the pleasantness cannot continue because the law of impermanence intervenes. . . . So we continue our search for something new, because everybody else is doing it too.

youth

i turned 30 last friday. it's a very odd thing to turn 30 in our society. one thing that i've noticed is that people tend to think of that as an "old" age. since my birthday, i've told multiple people that i'm 30, and their response falls into one of two camps: either they say, "oh, you don't look that old," or they say, "well, 30 isn't that old". (i'm not sure who they're trying to convince, themselves or me).

and yet only two weeks ago i mentioned to someone that i was 29, and the response was, "you're such a baby still!"

there's a bifurcation that happens as we age, i suppose. 30 is a milestone. people expect something of a 30 year-old. time to have your shit together. time to be independent and able to stand on your own two feet. a blundering 30 year-old doesn't get the smile and excusing nods that a blundering 25 year-old gets.

so, i suppose that's a loss of sorts. loss of youth. still young, but not a youngster. time to get ready to face the inevitable. death is not just for old people. it's not just for your patients. its coming. your aging. better get ready. the ultimate personal loss, loss of your own breath, is somewhere out there. and it's no longer something that will be grabbed from you before your time. it's not just freak accidents and lottery-luck cancers that one has to concern oneself with. as my youth marches firmly into my past, i realize that i've got some real-life actualization to take care of.

loss of my youth. loss of breath. loss of life.

it's coming. i want to be ready. i want to be strong.

daily dharma: Right livelihood has ceased to be a purely personal matter. It is our collective karma. Suppose I am a schoolteacher and I believe that nurturing love and understanding in children is a beautiful occupation. I would object if someone were to ask me to stop teaching and become, for example, a butcher. But when I meditate on the interrelatedness of all things, I can see that the butcher is not the only person responsible for killing animals. He does his work for all of us who eat meat. We are co-responsible for his act of killing. We may think the butcher's livelihood is wrong and ours is right, but if we didn't eat meat, he wouldn't have to kill, or he would kill less. Right livelihood is a collective matter. The livelihood of each person affects us all, and vice versa. The butcher's children may benefit from my teaching, while my children, because they eat meat, share some responsibility for the butcher's livelihood.

Meaningful Work
Thich Nhat Hanh in Claude Whitmyer's Mindfulness and Meaningful Work