A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (14 page)

Then, if we look anywhere, we find an impossible, unreasonable sea of green.

PART FOUR
a life
made of
days

A Broken Heart

A
few years ago, I had an attack of cardiomyopathy. A virus damaged my left ventricle, the part of the heart muscle that pumps blood through the body. My damaged heart limits my energy, my ability to move, to work, to think, to do anything at all. In the span of about forty-eight hours, my life was completely changed. I was consumed by crushing exhaustion, as if forcibly submerged beneath deep water. I slept at least sixteen hours a day and was barely awake for the remaining eight. Nothing I did could ever be described as “active.”

In many ways I have been both healing from, and fighting with, this limitation for the past four years. In one way or another, I am in a constant wrestling match with myself over how, and whether or not to make peace with what is true about my energy, my capacity in this moment. One thing is clear: I rarely want to accept or make peace with anything that is “less.” Part of me, after all these years, still wants what I once had.

I found myself tender and lost in places I used to feel confident and familiar. I felt angry with God and ashamed of myself. I thought I was stronger. In many ways I was, but I had grown into a false picture of myself, convinced that I was—or should be—able to do this and that, so many good things at once, start agencies and commissions, counsel and consult,
write books and travel and influence policy. Now I can only do a small fraction of that on a good day. Sometimes I feel terribly sad and frightened that I will never have as much strength, resilience, stamina, or energy, or be able to do everything I used to. Which is undoubtedly true.

So much of my worth as a human being, a man, a provider for my family, so much of my success in the world, had become entwined with maintaining a certain level of success, accomplishment, influence, and helping in the world. In retrospect, I found too much pride in my abilities, in the way I could always tap into some extra energy, some big push, some reservoir of juice that I could use to power through, to motivate or inspire people through my belief in them, through the sheer output of my will. I didn’t feel particularly special, I just felt it was somehow my calling, my birthright, to be able to do lots of things at once and do most of them well.

After my attack, I was so thoroughly exhausted, my energy so low, that at every moment I was faced with some kind of choice point. I learned that everything takes energy: Do I answer the phone, or do I go to the bathroom? Do I have something to eat, or do I read a few pages of a book? In no case could I ever do both, because any one choice would deplete all the energy I had, and I would have to surrender, again, back to sleep. If I ate anything, the energy needed to digest my food put me to sleep. If I spoke with a good friend on the phone, I would literally be falling asleep as I hung up the phone. I had to learn to listen, watch, and choose very carefully, every moment, how, where, or with whom I would share my ridiculously tiny moments of limited energy or attention.

I learned that even emotions require energy. Friendliness, being open to conversation, even hope for the future, needs energy. I realized how recklessly we spend, or waste, our precious energy on so many frivolous matters throughout a normal day, each of which drain us in small, imperceptible ways—unless you have so little of it that you must make choices to do only this, or only that. Our presumption that we can always access more energy—through exercise, diet, lifestyle, supplements, hormones, energy drinks—is a dangerous illusion that allows us to wildly overestimate how much we are actually capable of taking on with each new relationship, task, or responsibility.

During this time, I saw my many good friends with strong hearts working, moving, running from one good deed to another, at what appeared to me as lightning speed. I wondered, if I ever recovered my full complement of energy and life force, if I, too, would resume this same pace. I wondered if I could ever resume trying to plow through the long and frantic list I remembered as so familiar, so unremarkably common in our culture.

Since I may never recover my energy to the point it was before the attack, I have been spared the temptation to try and regain any kind of life at warp speed. But as I slowly, slowly recover some of that lost vitality, I find I am still unable to cast my energy, or project my plans, out much further into the future than these moments, this morning, at most, the end of this day. I developed a curious inability to imagine anything larger or more complex than the immediate choices before me. To the amusement, and often the frustration, of my beloved friends and colleagues, I am virtually useless at planning,
imagining, striving to create or sustain anything that requires me to prepare myself for more than one day at a time.

In the crucible of this physical limitation, I stumbled on the only practice available to me: to attend carefully to how much energy or attention I could honestly bring to this moment; to discern what was most true, beautiful, or necessary right here, right now; and to listen for what was, for me, in this moment, simply the next right thing.

There came a time when I had to make a choice about my health. Was I going to keep pushing, pushing, the limits of my heart’s endurance, trying to maintain some semblance of a life I could not honestly or honorably pretend to be living? Or would I accept, make peace with, what had been taken from me? More important, the deeper practice, the deeper question was this: Could I allow into my heart the full truth of the limitations on who I have become—and do so with mercy, even with loving-kindness, for all that had been taken and all that had been given in its place? Could I fall in love with the alchemy of the human heart, the enzyme that transforms suffering into grace?

My healing could truly begin to grow and flourish when I reluctantly began to confess to myself this other rigorous truth, growing beside the limitations of the first. I could still be kind (on the good days), listen well, and from time to time I could offer something of beauty to the world. Often, the most I have to give is my unhurried, undistracted company. And as I live slowly, slowly into this new, smaller life, I find that the attention I have for the color of the sky, the size of the daffodil shoots growing beneath my window, the fullness of the moon on tonight’s evening walk, recalling how it appeared to
me the night before, is a new, equally honest wealth beyond imagining.

We each have our own particular limitations. While mine may be physical and energetic, there are other physical, emotional, economic, political, and medical constraints that hinder our progress. Perhaps we are victims of racial discrimination, or have young children to attend to, or sick or aging parents to care for. We may carry inner fears, resentments, or confusions that make it harder for us to move through a hurried and complicated day. We all face and respond to these choice points in our own way.

There is a Tibetan parable that says if we put a tablespoon of salt in a glass of water and drink it, the water will taste terrible and bitter. But if we were to stir that same tablespoon of salt into an enormous, clear blue mountain lake, the water in the lake would remain sweet; we would not taste the salt at all.

The problem, the Tibetans say, is not the salt we are given. The real problem is how spacious is the container into which that salt is poured.

The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what, if anything, will be born in its place?

Listening

M
any of the spiritual teachings and traditions emerged, grew, and flourished among those who owned very little. Many of our world religions—Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, along with so many native and indigenous traditions—grew in the parched soil of the desert, in barren steppes, mountainous rock, and poor soil, places with little immediately available earthly abundance. Their experience of
enough
arose less from any storehouse of wealth granted them by their world, it grew instead from the inside out.

With so little evidence of plenty, no cornucopia of food, water, or abundant harvest, their prayers, rituals, and ceremonies drew from some fierce inner taproot reaching deep into an invisible groundwater of faith. It takes some kind of fathomless spiritual fortitude to insist that, in the midst of dust and ash, there could be even here, even in this soil, some fragrance of enough, enough for life, enough for hope, enough for just this, just this one day.

The astonishing power of these spiritual traditions is that they lived and grew in a time and place where there was less than abundance, seemingly less than enough. So our ancestors—the ones who came before us, who lived and died and to whom we owe so much more than we could ever imagine, understand,
appreciate, or ever offer sufficient gratitude—learned to listen. They listened in the desert for the sound of water. They listened in the heat for the fragrance of shade. They listened in plague and famine for the taste of food, herbs, and medicines. They listened with such deeply aching needs for mercy, compassion, healing for their children, the success of their crops so they might have food to live, the healing of some terrible illness, to be spared execution by some enemy, to sleep in peace and awake, alive, well, strong. They listened again and again, saturated with overspilling faith and trust that out of the most horrific silence would come the comforting voice of the Creator, offering sweet solace and reassurance of life, simply this. Life, life, life.

There is a story in
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
about Prince Siddhartha, who would later in his life go on to become the Buddha. Here, he awakens to the power of simple, mindful listening:

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty. Taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river. But today they sounded different.

This practice of deep listening is the beginning of wisdom. It allows us the privilege of absorbing, with gentle clarity, the way life unfolds beneath language and grows within and around us. Only when we listen deeply can we hear the deep and ancient rivers that flow through us.

The very first words of
The Rule of St. Benedict
, a guide for the monastic life, are these:

Listen, child of God. … Attend to the message you hear with the ear of your heart, so you may accept with willing freedom and fulfill by the ways you live the directions that come from your loving Creator.

Listen
. How do we do this
listening with the ear of our heart
? When our attention is bombarded daily, overwhelmed and saturated with the relentless clanging of so much speaking, announcing, sharing, selling, convincing, offering, presenting, discussing, declaring, and demanding—how can we ever find sufficient quiet to listen deeply to anything? When can we fully attend to those still, small voices of inner wisdom that reveal to us what is good, necessary, or nourishing?

One of my teachers, Archbishop Krister Stendahl, told me he found it curious that prayers of invocation invariably begin with some variation on asking God to “come here, be with us, and bless us.” This, he declared, was just arrogant foolishness. Who are we, he asked, to assume God is not here and everywhere already—and worse, that we must call him as we would a family pet, to come? The more humble, honorable—and accurate—prayer would recognize it is not God who is missing; rather, it is
we
who need to show up, to open our closed and fearful hearts, to listen with an ear bent toward the divine: “God, we beg you to cleanse our distracted hearts, that we may center ourselves in you, feel you here, guiding us, so we may listen and attend to your wisdom and guidance for us.”

Our practice, then, begins with an ability to listen. We find in so many spiritual traditions an urgent, compelling, and vital prayer to be guided, taught, shown what is, for us, for our families, for our world,
enough
. The question has implications for
everyone everywhere, because regardless of geography, nation, culture, religion, or education, it affects us all. And because our prayer can never be answered in any honorable way clearly or authentically in the same way for everyone.

So we begin by listening—a deep listening, with the ear of the heart, practiced among widely diverse spiritual communities. We listen for, name accurately, feel our way into, make peace with, what is, for us, for love, for life, for today, enough.

How Max Found His Way

W
hen my son Max was fifteen years old, he had one of the hardest years of his life. We had just moved, he had little self-confidence, he did not feel engaged in academics, and he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. He hated school, his teachers, himself, his appearance, and his parents. We were called weekly to meet with this or that teacher who was upset, angry, or disappointed with Max’s behavior. He was threatened with expulsion more than once. They said we had to make sure he showed up to school on time, prepared, with homework complete and ready to be turned in promptly. So every night became a struggle and endless fight about Max’s homework.

One night, I realized it was time, again, to go downstairs and yell at Max about his homework, which was due the next day, which I had been telling him to work on for a week, and which I knew he hadn’t even begun. But for some reason, on this particular night, I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I knew that if I spent one more night of my life—of our life together—yelling at him about homework, that something deep and essential might fracture. And it might never be repaired.

So halfway down the stairs, I sat down. I was silent for a while. This got even Max’s attention. I told him that I didn’t
care anymore if he did his homework. In fact, I didn’t care if he passed his classes, didn’t care if he got kicked out, didn’t care if he graduated. I told him I would support him in whatever he chose to do, however I could, but I wasn’t going to fight with him about school anymore. This was his life, and it was time for him to accept the consequences.