Mixed Blessing
How Many More?
Once you’re past 80 many things once taken for granted become impractical.
Like trying to fit 83 candles onto an icebox cake.
6 will do nicely. Enough for everyone who likes to place their ring around a candle in hope of piggybacking on the birthday boy’s prerogative.
What keener wish at this age than to have another birthday?
If you went virtually pain-free for 81 of those years, and then experienced near debilitating pain, the wish might be for some relief. For, as Tracey, our farmer neighbor and community wise man, said to me, “Grateful as you must be to have gone that long pain free, it didn’t teach you much about how to live with it. Or what use it might be, besides making you cranky and unfit to live with.
“Buck up,” he counseled, “I’ve lived with it for many years” (as, I suspect every dairy farmer has, from squatting to milk, and lifting heavy milk cans), “it’ll callous up after a while.” Never seen that word used as a verb but I get it and hope it may be so.
Pain is a teacher. Imagine how much of the world lives in pain, of all sorts, all the time.
What must it be like to go to bed hungry every night, as we’re told 193 million people do? Or suffer the emotional pain of being denied the right to be educated, access to voting. Or the 95 million people who live on less than $2.15 a day. The estimated 20% of the world’s people who suffer from chronic pain. And experience the emotional depression that can cause.
Or the estimated 3.5 billion of our fellows who have no health care?
A spiritual skill I’m seeking, is learning to offer my pain to the world’s pain. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, to be grateful for the reminder that there are people in Ukraine, Morocco, the leeward islands who are struggling against the worst human pain: hopelessness.
Did I remember, when I put my ring around that candle, to wish for some relief for people struggling? I hope so.
I don’t have the spiritual strength of Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nor of Tracey.
But I have been visited with a late life reminder of what so many of our fellows experience most of their lives. Does it seem perverse to be grateful for that reminder? My tentative attempts to embrace that are showing me the surprising strength that comes with acknowledging my visceral connection to my struggling kin.
Yes, we are one in the Spirit and we will rise and fall as one.