MRI

Who Knew?

Once I’d given up on denial (7+ months), insisting that my spine injury was transitory, simply needing time and exercise to recover, I submitted to medical people. Humbling and unwelcome.

83 and twisted like a pretzel, a person of sounder mind would have surrendered to reality much sooner. And likely with better prospects for recovery.

So it was that I found myself in that bizarre, loudly clanking, claustrophobic tunnel.

“Would you like to listen to the news?” the kind tech asked. Bad enough to be stuck in that machine, inches away from my face, but to listen to the day’s news would have made it intolerable.

“How about some chamber music?”I asked. Already missing the nearby Marlboro Summer Music Festival that has cheered up our summers for decades.

The tech immediately tuned into music that for the next half hour kept me from focusing on why I was in the machine in the first place.

“Only 8 minutes left,” came a soothing voice through the earphones. Though I was eager for release from the tunnel, I regretted not spending the rest of the morning having my overactive nervous system invited into contemplative, rather than problem-solving mode.

While it would be a bit expensive ($375 to $2,850 in the USA), and the pleasure would have given way to restlessness not much beyond the half hour, it occurred to me that may have been the first time in my long odyssey of meaning to make meditation an anchor of my mornings, without a single moment of considering that I had something else I needed to break away for.

The combination of beautiful music, and being captive, transcended my willful ego’s insistence that I get going and stop wasting time.

There’s a useful lesson here.

First of all, that even a now chronic, painful back provides an unexpected opportunity to learn something useful. The old saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” illuminates that experience.

It also reminds me that, as eager as I am to evolve into an accomplished Zen-like contemplative, I lack the discipline and perhaps the character for that advanced station.

What to do?

Be kind to myself. Not berate myself. Reflect in writing, which I am suited for and love to do, ways you and I can embrace that elusive extra dimension we long for. We are constantly being invited into new ways of loving being here, often in weird, unexpected, unrecognizable ways.

Often all it requires is to be more generous with ourselves. Knowing that the undeserved love that called us here, can never be extinguished.