Santosha, or Why the hell won't it stop snowing?

I had all these great plans about how my surgery and recovery were going to work out. I would teach all the way up until the morning before, wrap up all my other tasks, get lots of love and energy from friends. I knew who would be with me before and after, and I imagined my recovery in loving detail: Myself, maybe slightly uncomfortable and with limited mobility but handling it gracefully and coming back remarkably quickly to my old self; unlimited time to connect with the people I loved with no obligations; and of course I had the post-surgery list of mostly gentle tasks which I would take on, one by one, no rush but completing them easily. Ease was really the word I would have used pre-surgery to describe what I had planned for myself, and I saw myself wafting through these two weeks like a gentle breeze. Kind of makes you want to run right out and have some surgery yourself, doesn't it?

The reality came with the snow. I had not been imagining my surgery in loving detail; in fact, I felt anxious about it, and so I had the opportunity to sit with that for a while. (Don't you just love how many opportunities we have in life for growth and learning?) I realized after a while that my anxiety stemmed not from a fear of death, which is what I had assumed, but from a fear of pain, a fear of being afraid, a fear of the changes that might come all unexpected and unplanned. So really it was a fear of life I guess. And then it started snowing.

I would love to say that the snow messed everything up, but the truth is that the snow messed with my head. My fears became more specifically focused: My surgery would be delayed (it wasn't), we'd be trapped at the hospital (we weren't), I wouldn't be able to fulfill my pre-surgery obligations (I did), etc. The surgery went as planned and I went home and slept. And it kept snowing.

One of my fascinations with human beings is that we can hold so much contradiction, every noun (person, place or thing), every verb (action, doing, being) is surrounded by a complicated tangle of beliefs and emotions. (Remember diagramming sentences and teasing out those snarls of adverbs and adjectives, phrases and clauses, into tidy pruned branches?) But unlike the sentences in a novel, human beings are stories telling themselves while being told and everything keeps changing.

When I worked in sexual assault, people would often ask, "Isn't that really depressing?" The truth is that while it gives you an odd lens through which to view the world, it also gave me an opportunity for which I was truly grateful. Over and over again I got to be with people who had had this horrible thing happen to them (noun and verb), and accompany them on their journey to create something around it. The interesting thing is that people mostly create beauty.

After my surgery, my primary partner went back to work, my secondary sweetie went back to her town two hours away, and it kept snowing. My post-surgery plans were completely destroyed by the snow and I was trapped at home alone. And in my desire to create something beautiful out of something difficult, I settled in to enjoy the snow. Because I am a good yogini, I chanted and meditated and sent healing energy to myself. I completed all of the tasks on my list, I worked on my upcoming workshops and finished the essay I was working on. I had nothing but sympathy for the friends and loved ones who were themselves trapped by the weather while trying to figure out their own plans for getting to and from work and the upcoming holidays. I knitted them all sweaters. I painted the house, re-organized my files, backed up everything on the computer.

Ha! Okay, actually what I did while realizing that my plans had been changed for me, and that I needed to adapt, was to throw a big fit and get angry at everyone and sulk. And since I can't manipulate the snow, I threw everything I had into manipulating the people in my life into DOING WHAT I WANT THEM TO DO ANYWAY, DAMMIT!

Oh look! It's...another opportunity! I am generally very aware of when I am being manipulative. It usually has to do with being slightly dishonest about what I am feeling in the moment. And it's all about teasing out that tangle around my noun/verb and picking out what I choose to display. The day before yesterday I was having my tantrum, feeling forgotten by my friends, full of loneliness and self-pity and the unfairness of it all. By yesterday morning I was in recovery mode, figuring out what to do next and how to take care of myself. By afternoon I had had my first visitor and was content. My partner was home from work and I was enjoying her company. I had my first outing post-surgery. What I was feeling during those 24 hours was all sorts of things; what I was thinking during those 24 hours covered a huge territory. So what would I pick out of that mess to tell you, had you asked me how I was?

I have a perverse fascination with the social networking sites. Many of them have that feature where you can put in what you're doing right now and how you feel about it. I notice about myself that I often don't want to tell people what I'm feeling right now in that feature. I observe what I feel, but then I think about it. Am I feeling private? Do I want sympathy? Do I want laughter? And frequently I am holding on to the past, displaying for people what I DID feel, rather than what I DO feel, because I want them to respond to that.

It snowed again this morning. My partner is back to work and I am back to being trapped alone at home. But a shift has happened. I recently finished reading My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. As a neuroanatomist who has suffered a stroke and recovered, she has an interesting way of thinking about that process. In the book she talks about the choices we make to run specific brain circuitry. She makes the point that very little of what happens there is out of our control (90 seconds worth per reaction, according to her) and that the rest of it is ours to determine. And she talks about choosing to run the circuitry for joy, rather than that for fear or pain or anger, because it's a better way to live. When I read that, I immediately thought, hey, she's talking about yoga! In yoga we talk about the fact that we already live in bliss and that we can access it at any time. We talk about the patterns of our minds and how we tend to run the same patterns over and over again, and that becomes our practice, to establish and run different patterns by choice. One pattern that we can choose to run is santosha, contentment or making peace with what is.

It is tempting to imagine that santosha looks like that paragraph up there of what I would have liked my response to have been to my situation. If only I were a better person, not so petty and mean and manipulative. Last night I had a reminder of what I think santosha actually looks like when I talked with a friend on the phone. I was so happy to hear from her, and, when I heard her sincere sorrow and sympathy for my situation, something in me relaxed. She talked about the snow and how simply getting to and from work day in and day out has taken every scrap of energy she has, and how upset she is at all her plans for the holidays going awry, but then she went on, "This is going to sound weird, Autumn, but yesterday as I was struggling with driving to work, completely exhausted, I was just so in awe. I mean, I could barely keep my eyes on the road. Everything was just so beautiful."

It isn't that the bad things don't happen. It isn't that we somehow erase them from our consciousness. As I shift from what I wanted this time to be into what it is, I feel, I feel, I feel–I feel hamstrung and helpless in the face of the weather; even as I look for a change in the weather report, I feel so grateful that I don't need to get anywhere right now. I feel frustrated that the concerned attention from friends I wanted will become coffee dates to catch up on the news; even as I feel cheated by fate, I feel glad to recognize that my normal routine will return. I feel anxious to return my body to where it was and worried about teaching again; even as I mope about everything I can't do, I feel pleased and powerful at my ability to return to my practice, adapted to my current needs. I feel sad that I won't get to have my boyfriend come take care of me; even as I cling to the idea that it might still be possible, time is moving and when the snow melts I think I will be well enough not to want to lie around and be cared for. I mourn as I let go of the idea that this is an important connection I'm losing, but even in my disappointment, there is the new thought that maybe that won't be so bad; that in fact, I'm kind of tired of being in recovery and it might be nice not to be an invalid when I finally get to see him. I feel annoyed at friends who disappeared, and disappointed in myself for my small-mindedness. And I feel filled with wonder at how many people surprised me with their support, and I remind myself that sometimes love comes when you're looking the other way. I keep having this gleeful thought that I am really learning something right now, about how you just have to put out as much kindness and love and generosity as you possibly can to whomever is around you at the moment, and trust that while it may not come back from them specifically, it will come back. And the odd thing is that I recognize that this is something I really need to learn, that I need to understand, because it does not come easily to me, so I also feel grateful to have this opportunity brought to me. So even silly, limited, mean-spirited me, even I have made a beautiful bonsai out of the thing given me, the noun/verb not of my choosing.

I went to visit my friend Kellie in Ohio a month before her death. We both knew this would be the last visit. I sat on her bed and she told me she had been hoarding painkillers, just in case. But "I'm not ready yet," she said. She was paralyzed by this time from the armpits down, had been through two rounds of chemotherapy and many surgeries, and she lay in bed looking out one tiny window. The view from the window didn't look like anything special to me; I looked out and just saw the small tree put in for landscaping. Kellie looked past me through the window and her face opened like the sky. "It's still so good," she said. "You know? It's still so good." Let it snow, I guess. Santosha.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles