Living once again

I feel like I am waking up from a long sleep as I, once again, begin to discover the flavor of experience. There is a feeling of calm within my spirit; a restful realization that comes when one ends a whirlwind of tumultuous focus and activity that removes us from our own realities. The grass looks a little greener, the scent of summer permeates my senses…. I am once again part of the living.

For the past three years, life had become the blinking call waiting light on the telephone, constantly flashing in the background, reminding me that it was still there but something I just couldn’t quite get to; the present call was too consuming to let go. Yet, it was the present call that allowed me the opportunity of metamorphosis; to grow into a dream – the next level of my human experience. To be what I always wanted to become…. a nurse.

It wasn’t necessarily a mid-life crisis, for being in a healing profession has always been a covert desire in my personal pursuit of purpose; but, I guess one could say it was more of a mid-life awakening. A realization that, dreams only last as long as life. Once it’s gone, so is the opportunity of fulfillment. Turning 50 meant that I had lived more than half of my life (my ancestral genetic makeup consists of an average lifespan of about 75 years) and it was time to stop dreaming and start pursuing.

Through my adult life, I’ve almost constantly been entrenched in one form of education or another. I picked and weeded my way through one course at a time while doing the single mother gig, obtaining a four year and then graduate degree. The long hours of clinical and studying for nursing school was out of the question when raising two teenagers and working 1.5 jobs. However, as time allowed, if I wasn’t working at night and on the weekend towards a degree, I was taking workshops, reading, doing research…. Constantly in the pursuit of new understanding. So, it’s not like I wasn’t used to pedagogy or being committed to working hard. What did take me by surprise, however, was how consumed my life would be as I worked my way through the intense science pre-requisites for which letter grades of “A” were almost mandatory based on the competitive waiting list of others pursuing the same dream.

When I did get into the nursing program, I found myself caught in a kaleidoscope of peaks and troughs, sacrifices, amazing discovery and sometimes shear exhaustion. The world around me virtually seemed to stop sometimes as I excused myself from the world of the living. Life didn’t stop, of course, but I took a sabbatical, and those closest to me experienced the fall out.

As the semesters passed and the intensity grew (along with my hips) I often questioned myself on whether the means really justified the end. As the train picked up momentum, I would see some of my fellow travelers jumping or falling off at various stops, or hanging on by their fingernails as the force of acceleration tried to shake us off. Many times, I felt myself slipping and tried to hang on with everything I had. Through the hours of visiting and revisiting concepts and processes, my travelers and I would share tears, laughter and glasses of wine wondering if we would ever reach our destination or if the depot would be closed when we arrived. In the meantime, outside of our exclusive subculture of craziness, people in our lives were moving on. Kids were growing, people married, babies babies were born, and loved ones and pets died. Physically, we struggled to be present, but mentally, we most of us had one foot planted in an alternate reality – always thinking, planning, strategizing—focused on the next exam or clinical observation. It was like that phrase from an 70’s rock song… “The lights were on but no one was really home.”

We often hear sociologists and psychologists talk about the concept of “Institutionalization” and dysfunctional adaptation when people who have been incarcerated, hospitalized or held captive for long periods of time suddenly find themselves back in the “real world.” They have become so used to the structure and conditions in which they were living, they have to reinvent themselves as they adjust to their old lives once again. I can understand that now. Certainly this doesn’t compare to the negative connotation that may present, but, in a positive way, it does. There is a world out there of spending time with family and friends, reading the Sunday paper or a Stephen King novel without the guilt of neglect, and rediscovering the smell of lavender in my yard. Music is no longer a distraction but is, once again, a cathartic. My body can move away from the laptop and my fingers can create and express feelings as I play my guitar or dig in my garden. I can hug my husband without being distracted by the stack of books in the corner; visit my children and grandchildren without transporting my library so I can study on the train; I can sleep again at night.

Yes, life has returned. But there is something new and different this time, for, in the process of rediscovering all of these wonders and reinventing my life, there is a new undercurrent of excitement and satisfaction flowing underneath. There is a foundation of knowing that wasn’t there before, not only of new things but that dreams can become more than a fleeting thought; they can become reality.

Educated, licensed and ready to go, I start my new career in a few weeks. I’ll go into the world a little smarter, hopefully a little wiser, and able to channel my deep passions into making someone else’s life just a little better. True, I don’t have the number of years ahead of me to make my mark as I might have if this had happened when I was younger… but I also would probably not have understood the magnitude of this gift I have experienced if I had done this when I was less mature. The years may not be quantitative, but the quality cannot be surpassed. I’m back world, and ready to take off. And, I’m a nurse!

Mindless Mindfulness?

I haven’t blogged in such a long time. Guess this mindfulness thing is a lot more challenging than I would have thought; then again, maybe its not. Maybe sometimes we use it just to get through a moment which would otherwise leave us feeling hopeless and helpless and we don’t even realize it. It just happens and it gets us through. Mindless mindfulness?

These past few months have presented a multitude of opportunities for me to try on my colors. A roller coaster of emotions and life events requiring me to be in the moment; even the moments I cared not to be in. I’ve watched someone I love more than life itself despair over the loss of a dream and then celebrated the news of new beginnings for another during the same day. I’ve sat by someone dear to me when the doctor told her she had stage III breast cancer, and obliged her request on Christmas, shaving her head even though I quietly cried as I stood behind her fragile, delicate body. Then, only weeks later, I felt the joy of hearing the tumor was responding to chemo and that she would, ultimately, find some reprise from the devastation she had experienced. Additionally,
I recall how I felt betrayal from being physically injured by an animal I loved and trusted, and grief as I held a kindred spirit feline while he breathed his last breath in my arms.

My intention is not to focus on negative moments. For through it all there was a constancy of knowing things were really okay. There was having the security and love of a supportive, patient husband making me laugh and showing me the world through his funny, playful eyes; hearing my little baby grandchild’s vocabulary grow with each phone call until he finally said his own rendition of the word grandma “bahka”; trips to New York and Boston and meeting so many wonderful people along the way. There’s the security of being offered a job months before I’ve even graduated. There are the new friends that I’ve made in such a short time and the satisfaction of knowing that the long hours of study and clinical hours are taking us all to places in our lives where our work will leave a mark somehow, somewhere for someone… even if we never know it did.

Life. Its made of so many surprises. Then comes the question: What do we do with them? My first inclination is to say that I totally let my quest for middle aged mindfulness go out the window with each event. And, if I am talking about the cognitive, deliberate action of recognizing it for what it is… I probably did. But then there is that other voice, that still little piece of my inner self, my “God” that simmers deeper inside that reminds me of the clarity I felt during some of those moments, and realize that I was more in the moment during the extremes highs and lows than at any other times in my life. It’s the times in between that need the work!

I often hear people say things like, “How could God let that happen?”, or, “If there is such a thing as God, we wouldn’t suffer.” Well, my answer is, first, depending on what your expectations really are and what you perceive “God” to be, perhaps these things happen specifically because it is through those moments that we define ourselves and really feel the presence of life itself. Maybe, until we really figure out how to capture that focus and fuse it into everyday, mundane moments, we will continue to witness that which we think we don’t want – only to find out that on some level… we do!

Who knows what the next months have to offer for me or anyone else? Maybe there will be even more painful moments; maybe Nirvana. Whatever. The important thing is that we do our best to get through them and then, when we look back, we see the lesson in it all. At least then it is not all in vein.