As some of you know, I’ve been super healthy of late. It’s as if I have a wall of protection around me.
Yeah, that’s not quite right.
My doctor looked at me the other day and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t know one person who has had so many issues in so little time. I was flattered! Of all the people in his 30 years of practice I outrank them all!
I’m special! But then who isn’t eventually in precisely this fashion — well a few escape relatively unscathed by pain and panic. They are freaks of nature.
I had a friend who in his 70s simply tipped his patio chair back, fell over, hit his head and was gone. No serious sessions in the oncology office to scare the heck out of him, no tubes at the hospital, no IVs, no cameras where they shouldn’t go, no heroic measures at the end. Lucky guy! Must have totally pleased God. It was like he was translated at the end, gone over to the other side in his chariot-chair like Elijah the prophet. It was nigh unto Biblical!
My situation is different. The universe is playing yo-yo with my patio chair. I tip up, I tip down. I recover from something. I get something else. Much like most folk really.
I have had some unique experiences on this journey. I went to the hospital for the first time. I now have a new view of eggs. My breakfast egg — couldn’t recognize it. It came to the plate pulverized, blended and repacked into a small, wet dome. It was stolid, squat and grey-green. It looked like an army quonset hut, and it tasted faintly like it had spent time in the kitchen sink being washed.
Even the dietitian squirmed over it, picked it up, gagged and brought me back a proper omelette. It wasn’t half bad. I stayed another day by faking symptoms just for another cheesy omelette.
What to make of my poor health, my hospital visits, my situation, my eggs? All in all it is probably simplest to say the obvious, “Oh life! You always have been like this — no surprises here. You always have been up and down.”
But still, and yet, and furthermore and irresistibly sometime I try to add meaning to it all. The other day it occurred to me that I feel like I have been shoved into a chrysalis, melted into goop, or syrup, and God only knows what halting, deformed, half-flying, half-crawling woofer wonder will crawl out of this fresh hell.
Maybe this experience will be transformative.
Maybe I’ll turn into a kind of Christian Yoda! But taller. I’ll utter aphoristic witticisms using inverted syntax that leave my followers mystified for weeks but don’t really mean anything. Or I’ll transform into a kind of Dalai Lama, and write a wise book, and receive guests from all over the world.
Probably. That is probably what will happen.
Thrive! 