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| Hiding under the covers is always an available option once you've exhausted all the others. |
Everything was normal. Until it wasn’t.
I got back from lunch, looked around and something was wrong: there was a blindspot. Something was missing that had always been there. I opened and closed each eye, I slowly moved my hands in front of my face to determine at which exact point I lost them, trying to pinpoint exactly what I was missing and how much.
My mind went big fast: brain tumor. What else could it be? I’ve been falling, I feel a bit of pressure on my eye, and I can’t see. “This is going to kill my parents,” was all I thought on the cab ride to the emergency room.
“Everything’s fine,” I texted my boss, “but I can’t see. I’ll text you when I know.”
“Detached retina,” the (attractive) ER doctor said. He tried not to smear my eyeliner as he wiped the ultrasound goo off my eyelid (because I told him it mattered).
Ok, so detached retina. Given how big and how bad I’d gone in the 3 hours it took to get diagnosed, this sounded like a cakewalk. I got a tea, declined offers of rides, walked home. I was calm. “Maybe I’ll get the day off work tomorrow after the procedure,” I thought.
“Seven days.”
“What?”
“You need to be lying on your side for seven days. You can take breaks for minutes, but 90% of the time you have to be lying on your left side keeping the hydrogen bubble that we’ll insert behind your eye in place, allowing the retina to reattach itself,” the surgeon said to me 24 hours after diagnosis.
Everything was bigger and worse than I had thought: the surgery, the recovery time, the bloody mess of an eyeball I had to go out into public with for weeks afterwards. And yet.
Never would panicking have helped. I would have been stressed, afraid, unable to sleep that night had I known what I was walking into. And none of that would have helped in any shape or form. Being afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do yoga for a month would have been so much worse than hearing that I couldn’t do yoga for a month and subsequently not doing yoga for a month. Being afraid of what I would look like after having my eye pinned open and prodded three days in a row would have been so much worse than looking in the mirror after those three days, seeing what I looked like, and going about my life.
By choosing to stay in the moment, accepting new information as it came, and not Web MDing both blindspot+falling (brain tumor) or detached retina (blindness) I was able to do what needed to be done as per the professionals responsible for helping me, get some sleep, and cope with the results. If I’d chosen to let my fear overtake me, my curiosity get the better of me, I’d have raised my cortisol levels and minimized my ability to sleep, and both of which would have negatively affected my healing and ability to be present when I underwent the surgery, heard and understood the recovery time, and learned of no yoga. This allowed me to undergo surgery relaxed, and process and accept the other two things in real time.
The fear and the panic is not the event itself and is usually worse than the actual event. We can handle events, we can receive bad news. The decision to allow our brains to spin yarns of endless possibilities of negative outcomes is useless and irresponsible.
And now we are in the midst of a global pandemic. How many of us saw that coming other than Bill Gates and Mark in accounting (he claims)? And I am trying to apply the same philosophy as the eye approach: this is what we know now. I am trying not to spin out, I am trying not to think too far ahead. Yes I could be laid off, yes I could have to give up my apartment, yes I may have to take on debt. And all of that could have happened regardless of a COVID-19 outbreak but I wasn’t freaking out about it five weeks ago. Five weeks ago I was sipping a coconut through a reusable straw on a beach in Indonesia wholly unaware that in less than a month my ability to travel would be taken away from me due to 1. A detached retina and 2. A fucking Pandemic.
More than a million different outcomes are possible right now -- some of them good, some of them not, but none of them affect right now. Now we wash our hands, we keep space, we fill out the forms we need to fill out. We wait, we remain curious. None of the problems we are about to experience will be solved by our stress being the guiding force in our life. What were you stressed about three weeks ago? The climate? Your chubby arms? Trump? I haven’t had a single conversation about anything other than the corona virus in over a week. And the conversations have not been with scientists. They have been with people who think their opinion on what world leaders should have done and should be doing matter. Would anyone have listened? Would I? Isn’t what’s so shocking about this in the west, that something is trumping the economy in terms of importance to the entire world? And how, in order to value human lives over the economy, we’re all at risk of losing our homes and ability to feed ourselves because the economy is about to collapse? Is everyone else wondering if maybe the system in place is just a little flawed?
But anyhoo.
What’s going on matters. It’s here and it’s happening. The future hasn’t happened yet. We’ll worry about that when we get there. This is what we know right now: there is a global pandemic. To prevent its spread (and by proxy, mass deaths) and buy time for a vaccine, we should limit leaving our house, disinfect, wash our hands and not gather together. The outcome is in no way tied to how much sleep we lose thinking about what we are most afraid of. Worrying is not a strategy nor is it an exercise in control.
I’m not saying don’t stay informed, don’t follow recommendations of the medical community, don’t take this seriously (it’s a fucking pandemic, how could you not). I’m saying don’t let your brain spin out on what could happen because I guarantee you you aren’t even imagining a fraction of every possible outcome. So why choose to focus on one or two that keep you up at night and will be the cause of your eventual heart attack? Moments can be met head on. People are resilient and adaptable as fuck.
We must stay informed from reliable sources, turn off the news machine whose intention it is to addict not inform, limit all media (social or not) and get ahead of our thoughts. That is what I have learned through meditation: our thoughts are not independent of our control nor is it mandatory that we fall victim to the direction they lead us. We have the option of reigning in our thoughts. We can acknowledge our fears and then we can acknowledge that fear, just like weather -- just like clouds in the sky -- are not, in fact, fact. We are not our thoughts (of which fear is one). If we were, we wouldn’t be able to see them, but we can. We are the one who sees. We are the one behind the thoughts and the thoughts are behind the fears. It is possible to access, even if we never have before, and the more often you get to that place, the easier it is and will continue to be to access and eventually, spend more of your time as than not.
I lost my job (twice), lived in my car for a year, was in $30,000 of debt (twice), and my cat died -- everything but the cat was in the same year. And it was all just an experience. As long as we’re alive, we’re here to have experiences. Maybe some of them will seem good (lucky!) and some of them most certainly will seem not good, but they are all equal in measure -- all life is is a series of experiences. Currently, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. We do not know how this is going to go, but one thing I love is that it is affecting every single one of us. It is impossible to turn a blind eye right now. In 2015 I released a little book of poetry with a title I thought was just hyperbole: We’re All In This Together.
And boy, are we ever.
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