I had barely finished writing and posting yesterday's
article about making time for Important things instead of just the
Urgent, when something Really Urgent
came up. I started passing a couple of kidney stones. Thanks to
neighbour Doug I was whisked off to the hospital quickly, doped up with
a non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug called Toradol (ketorolac
tromethamine) -- a non-narcotic painkiller that worked nearly as well
as the Demerol (meperidine hydrochloride) they gave me the first two
times I had kidney stones, and without the spaciness and euphoria --
and then I was sampled and scanned to confirm my diagnosis. It took two
hours from the onset of the first severe and agonizing attack (an 11 on
the Richter pain scale, as anyone who's had one will tell you) until
the Toradol kicked in. When it did, I just lay there, grateful,
relieved, comfortable, content -- doing nothing
for three hours. No thinking, no writing, no planning, no worrying, no
meditating, no questioning. Just lying there with a faint smile,
relishing the calm, and just wanting it to go on and on.
There's a lesson here, perhaps: There's nothing like experiencing
horrific pain or unbearable anguish to make you oh-so-grateful for a
subsequent moment of mediocrity, of unfeeling, of pure, lazy
contentment. Maybe a reason that so many people are so change-resistant
and so content with the status quo, at least in its quieter moments, is that they live so much
of their lives in such interminable and extreme dread, ground down to
feelings of disconnection and misery and helplessness and hopelessness
and fear, that they are simply grateful for the brief escapes to joy or
contentment. Let someone else
be responsible for the intractable. Maybe those relatively few of us
armed with skills, with knowledge, with imagination, are being too hard
on our fellow human beings who have no such armour. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, Eliot wrote. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, wrote Thoreau.
I'm beginning to appreciate that perhaps we won't be able to engage the
vast majority of people in our world to entertain bold changes to make
life better, until we help them to make their own lives peaceful and
bearable. A tall order. We merely struggle with the Machine in Our
Heads, while those who have been less gifted in their lives than we,
struggle with demons that we cannot fully appreciate, except in moments
(like mine yesterday) when we experience them first hand. It was quite
humbling.
So my article this Sunday is going to be on compassion, sympathy, humility. Not enough of these things in this world.
None of this occurred to me while I was in the hospital, mind you. And
I'm now proud owner of two tiny copper-coloured calcium kidney stones
that look alarmingly like kidneys in miniature.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
