You don’t have to travel far down the life path before coming in contact with challenge and difficulty.In fact, some say that life by design is defined by challenge and difficulty and that much of the good that life has to offer us can only be found in the challenging times.
And in this matter of challenge and difficulty, I’ve noticed that no matter how big or small our particular challenges are as compared to some objective measure of human difficulty, our challenges always feel big to us.
Today I want to embrace one of the traditions that have come to define Journeys Community.That tradition is the personal sharing that takes place here that can be so powerfully instructive to us all.
When Journeys was just an idea, when all of this was being envisioned, Harry and the others who worked with him to give shape to Journeys took instruction from the wonderfully healing organization, Alcoholics Anonymous.What they valued about AA was the tradition of sharing.
We are all fellow travelers on the life path and nothing rivals the value of the instruction that can come from a fellow traveler.And so in that spirit I share with you today.
In the Bible the apostle Paul talks about a physical infirmity, “a thorn in the flesh” that bothered him.For several years now I have had my own thorn in the flesh.I have what the doctors call an end stage ankle, one that is constantly painful and one where my only surgical option is an amputation.Even then, there is no guarantee that the pain will end.
One night some time ago, awake in the dead of night, feeling alone with this pain I began to feel a strong wave of despair.I had recently visited with yet another physician with expertise in the area of problems like mine.He had been honest and frank with me and confirmed my fears that medical care held no promise of eliminating my pain.
That night I faced more fully into the reality of having to live from now on with this pain and the limitations it imposes on my life.And as I did, I felt an added measure of despair and desperation.I couldn’t get back to sleep and so I decided to look this demon, this challenge, squarely in the eye.I had heard, I had often even said to others in times and places like this that the nature of the life mystery is one where we are sure to face challenges and difficulties and that it is in relation to how we deal with these challenges that our lives will either find meaning and satisfaction or our lives will be so much less. Life’s challenges offer us opportunity for real meaning and satisfaction just as they can also be the source of our undoing and failure.
And so that night it hit me squarely, that this was yet another challenge in my life; and that while I had the confidence of having met other challenges, this one was different.It was an ongoing challenge, one where the problem grew in magnitude over time, one where new mitigating events didn’t offer a measure of salve and comfort.I had lost two wonderful love ones and while all of you who have suffered such losses know the pain of that kind of loss never goes away, you do begin to pick up your life and order it around the present which, if we are open to it, always brings new goodness to us, goodness that mixes with the pain of loss and mitigates its sting to some degree.
But this pain felt different.Nothing new coming into my life, certainly things new from the medical profession, had mitigated this pain.It continued day in and day out, dulled some by a wonderfully instructed daily regimen of physical and medical therapy.But it was still there and difficult to ignore, particularly in the dark of night, when the distractions of the day had been dialed back.And now with the verification of no hope on the horizon from medical science, I faced the prospect of coping with a life-long continuation of this pain.
In that dark night, feeling alone and despairing.I accepted, really for the first time, that this pain was one of those challenges that would define what life would be for me.And out of that acceptance came a struggle for meaning and fullness of life.Out of that acceptance I turned to this pain and began to try to claim from it a richness that would insure that life, life here and now, would remain a gift and not began to become a curse.
That struggle, that exploration has been an ongoing one and talking about it recently with Barbara I decided to share some of what I have learned and some of what I am continuing to learn as I continue to mine from this challenge in my life all the goodness that the Giver of life makes available for us to claim.
First, I discovered the wonderful resource that perspective can offer.It is so easy to come to see our problems as being the greatest problems of all.In fact I think the desperation that we can sometimes feel in the face of the challenges in our lives has a lot to do with a loss of perspective.And a loss of perspective in the direction of making our challenges greater, placing our challenges in the category of human catastrophe; a loss of perspective whereby we elevate our struggles to the top of the list of all challenges currently being experienced or ever having been experienced by any human being.Because they are our challenges they are the greatest, the most difficult, most abhorrent challenge human kind can experience.
If it’s only a hangnail, it’s my hangnail.If it’s my problem, it’s a catastrophe.Classifying our challenges this way, elevating them like this makes them all the more difficult to confront.
In the aloneness of my painful dark nights I began to claim the benefit that comes from adjusting my perspective.Medical science may not be able to eliminate my pain, may not be able to restore my loss function, but I can adjust my perspective and bring a measure of relief if not to my pain certainly to the compounding of it through desperation and despair.And so painful sleepless nights as well as day times have become opportunities for me to focus on those facing far greater challenges than me.I use these times to acquaint myself with those more rightfully claiming a place at the top of human struggles and I find ways, however small, to try to address their plight.Some of these people are close by, near and known.Others are far away and known to me only through the work of those shining a light on their plight.
I may have daily pain and a loss of function to deal with, but I am not homeless and hungry.I’m not living in a refugee camp, having witness the slaughter of my family by a mindless raging genocide. I’m not without friends who love and care for me.I’m not bound to a sweatshop by a cruel employer.And so much more I’ve come to see, so much that challenges both mind and body afflicts others but not me.And as I focus on these, finding some way to try to contribute to easing their terrible burdens, I turn my attention from my challenges and in so doing ease my burden.
This issue of perspective can also impact us at an existential level.It’s easy to generalize from the present to begin to feel that what is will always be.Such generalization can cause us to loose sight of the basic givens of this life mystery; one of them being that life is time limited.Life, as we know it in this venue, is not forever.By design it was meant to be brief when measured against the vastness of time.Life and all that we encounter here, the easy and the difficult, does not last all that long.It is a quick process and if we loose sight of this basic reality we will be like the proverbial traveler on the fast train moving through a small town.We blink and miss it all.
And so adjusting my perspective in relation to the basic given of the brevity of life helps me.It helps me stay focused on the opportunities for good and meaning.Despair robs us of the goodness that coexists with our challenges.
Hopelessness in relation to our difficulties closes our eyes to all of the good surrounding all the moments of our lives, even those that coexist with our difficulties.
Hypnotists talk about the focal and the peripheral stimuli; how in each moment there is something, whether internal in our thoughts and feelings or external that is focal.It’s what we are paying attention to.At the same time there are those things, thoughts, feelings as well as external things and events that always surround the focal stimulus.Hypnosis is all about being selective about what is focal and what is peripheral.
When you and I make and keep our challenges focal in our lives we will always feel their full weight and find our spirits sagging under it.But when we push them to the periphery and choose something else, some one, some event, some feeling or concern to honor by making it focal, then we always lessen our load and brunt the impact of a difficult challenge.
Quite simply, I realized I don’t have the time to give my full attention to my pain.I find it challenging enough to find enough time to access some of the richness of opportunity that life offers.My difficulty gets my attention, sometimes my full attention but far less than it tries to claim.
And so adjusting perspective and acting on that adjustment, making others and other things focal is an opportunity for living more fully.When you have something like this in your life, when you have a major challenge in your life it demands that you select something else to be center stage because if you let it stay in the spot light it blocks all of the good from coming your way.
Another helpful resource has been humor.Being alert to the humor in life is always good for us.Have you noticed how when people get together they enjoy hearing a funny story, how our conversation tries to find and include the humor in our lives?It’s good for us to laugh and be amused.A friend shared with me not long ago how her mother continued to laugh and find humor in life even as she declined and died from ALS.My uncle who over time lost most of his sight and his hearing began writing jokes.The other day at a music barn I laughed as one of the singers, a man struggling with cancer, told jokes about his rural neighborhood.He said he met an ole boy carrying a big sack across his back while walking down the road.And he asked, “What you got in the sack?” And the ole boy responded, “Chickens.”To which the man responded, “If I were to guess how many chickens you have in that sack would you give me one of them?”The ole boy said, “Hell, if you guess how many chickens I got in this sack I’ll give you both of them.”
Another helpful thing I have found is to not wear my trouble on my sleeve, so to speak.While I accept with a truly grateful heart the kindness of friends and strangers who offer me a helping hand, open a door or like a man the other day, help me get my groceries to my car, I quickly and universally decline pity.
I suppose the person who offers it most to me is my mother.I know something about parental love and I can understand that it almost hurts her to see me hurting.But I often tell her that while it may not look like it sometimes, my life is blessed and that most of the time I feel the full measure of the gift God intended us to accept when He gave us the gift of life.I tell her that I operate from the notion that my life is richly rewarded by the goodness that I have found and this includes the goodness that I have discovered through my struggle with this challenge.And so I don’t consider myself, my disability, worthy of pity or of any concern by others.Like the apostle Paul said, “In all things give thanks”, I give thanks for all in my life, including this pain.As challenges go, as compared to the enormous unthinkable challenges some face, mine isn’t all that great, even if it is my challenge.And like a good challenge it has offered me great opportunity to enrich my life and claim more of the gift that God intended when life was made mine.And so I don’t deserve nor will I accept pity or sympathy from myself or anyone else.
It’s not hard to see what such an attitude can do for you.Even in those most difficult times, when the strong neurogenic pain breaks through and demands to be focal, declining the opportunity for pity, particularly self-pity, gives you a hugh leg up on coping and living well in the face of difficulty.
Another resource I have found helpful is to fully own all aspects of my reality.My friend Harvey Minchew talks about the necessity to embrace one’s reality, no matter how challenging, if you are going to find goodness and meaning in life.
This problem had already altered my life.It had taken things from me that I deeply valued.I grieved the loss of these life activities.And I began to realize that grief could not be resolved until I fully accepted the change my ailment had brought to my life.As I faced into this I realized that change always has two components.It has what it takes away from us.It has an ending component.Things we had we have no more.But change also has what it brings to our lives.It has a beginning component.New possibilities that did not exist or seem quite so apparent come into our lives but only if we are open to them.I realized that I had been spending my energies grieving the losses that this ailment took from me and that I had to let go of that sadness if I was ever going to be able to find within this change the new beginnings it opened to me.
And so I have more fully accepted this challenge as an ongoing, permanent part of my life.And so I say to my pain, since you are going to be here, since you won’t go away, you might as well come on in and make yourself at home.And since you are going to do that, I might as well ask you, what do you have to offer me?How can you instruct my life for good and what changes for the better that you offer me can I claim?
For several years now I’ve tried hard to stop focusing on what I lost and instead have tried to open myself to the goodness, the new gifts that change always makes possible if we are willing to let go of what was and thereby have our hands open to receive what can be.
Out of this attitude I have looked for and found new ways to enjoy things that my difficulty seemed to take away.For example, I have migrated my love of travel from air travel to more road trips in my specially equipped car and often with a driver and I’ve discovered a whole new dimension to the joys of travel.
I start my day with a physical therapy regimen.And sometimes I follow it with a leisurely late morning breakfast with a group of friends I met at a nearby diner.We share with each other, always looking for the humor in our lives, telling jokes brightening our day.This simple event is a gift and just one of the many good gifts that change has brought me.
I have discovered new joys that I hadn’t known much about and which my companion pain has introduced me to, joys that come from an acceptance of the changes that this challenge has introduced in my life.For me while this pain has taken away much of my physical vitality and the things, the ways, I expressed that vitality, it has pointed me in a new direction, one of stillness and aloneness and introspection and thought out of which I have found new wonderful parts of the life reality and new opportunities for joy and meaning.There are wonderful experiences we can find as we live with greater stillness.Reading, writing, talking with others attempting to live more consciously and aware of the now of life has brought goodness into my life.
Most importantly I try to surround myself with people who are also trying to do well in relation to their life challenges.I look for the hopeful ones, the ones not easily defeated, the ones living consciously, aware that life is right now with no time outs for injury and pain.And I treasure these friendships and the very few precious ones with whom we make ourselves fully known.With one or two of these I often share my feelings in the moments when the struggle is greatest.And I never have come away from these times of sharing without having gained another significant leg up in relation to this struggle.
It’s hard for some of us, particularly those of us who have claimed a role of helper; it’s hard for us to express our need for help.Dear friends help me do this and for that I am very grateful.
George Vaillant has devoted his career to a longitudinal study of a group of subjects.He tells the story, a modern day parable, of a man who had two sons; how at Christmas he put a gold watch in one son’s stocking and in the other a pile of horse manure.The one son, he said, came to his father perplexed saying he didn’t know what to do with the beautiful watch, that it was so fragile he was afraid of breaking it.While the other son came to his father all excited saying, “Santa had left me a pony.I just have to find where it is hiding.”
Vaillant says the life stories of his subjects were defined by how they dealt with the challenging events of their lives.And he describes four types of responses characteristic of his subjects; the highest, most beneficial being adaptations to our reality, no matter how challenging, that include altruism, humor and anticipation.
And so in relation to challenges and difficulties, in relation to the unavoidable challenges that we face along our life paths, in relation to these events and circumstances that will define what measure of gift and meaning and purpose we find in life, I offer you these suggestions born of my wrestling with a challenge that won’t go away.
Hold to the best perspective. Never forget that all of us are caught up in a marvelous mystery.As Cormac McCarthy says in his book The Road, “The breath of God is passed from man to man through all of time….and all things are older than man and they all hum with mystery.”Stay mindful and involved with your brothers and sisters who share this mysterious journey with you, particularly those who are higher up on the ladder of human misery and difficulty.Feel their need and get busy making a difference in their lives.
Remember that at best this is a short, brief time we spend in this venue and that you don’t have time to get too terribly distracted by your problems.
As much as you can, keep your challenges on the periphery of your awareness and reserve the honored focal spot for things, people, and circumstances that move your life down more hopeful and meaningful paths.Healthy distractions are among the best medicine you can claim.
And while you accept the goodness others extend you, decline their pity.Particularly decline self-pity.
And keep your eyes open to the humor in your life and in life around you.
Embrace your reality and ask for and claim the gifts that it brings you.
And then just maybe, just maybe if you do this, you also, like the apostle can achieve the high goal of giving thanks in all things.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
and is filed under Thanks.
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