A Practice of Patience

Collisions of perfectionism and healing

I stumbled into the practice of writing poems the year I emerged from a persistent illness. I had been sick for about eight months.  A chest cold one September developed into bronchitis that just wouldn’t quit. Vaporizing eucalyptus, drinking gallons of tea, trying to rest, and all the usual home self-care remedies didn’t have much impact.  Antibiotics were ineffective. My family got tired of the incessant coughing – it’s hard to relax when your loved one is up half the night. I landed in the emergency room on Thanksgiving day that year – I’d woken up disoriented and with a pretty solid case of vertigo and nausea.  Turns out I was dehydrated, and after an IV of fluids, a clear chest Xray and a negative strep test, they sent me on my way, feeling less dizzy, but still coughing. 

Weeks after the Thanksgiving ER fiasco, I was still coughing. I went back to the doctor, did a round of Prednisone and took home an emergency inhaler.  I saw a specialist and learned I didn’t have asthma but “looked really healthy” (...what not to say to a sick person, especially if you are a health care provider…) As spring started to think about showing up that next calendar year, the lingering cough invited a bout with the flu and a double ear infection.  In the midst of this, I was trying really hard to claim what was going on and figure out what I needed to do to own the illness and learn from it.   

That April I started writing a poem a day.  Not long poems, just a few sentences about what I was noticing outside in combination with my internal battle to heal. Usually an essayist, I didn’t have the energy to write at length like I usually did, so poetry’s brevity seemed like something worth trying on.   

One of the poems that came out in my new-found practice was: 

After months of no answers from all the doctors I saw and then beating myself up for failing to heal through positive thinking and “raising my personal vibration”, something shifted.  I stopped trying to find deep meaning in the experience of being sick.  I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to get better.  I started paying attention to what I needed in the moment, be it a walk outside, a cup of tea, a hard conversation, or letting someone else carry part of a burden.  I started to look at the concept of strength through a different lens. If I learned anything during that time, it’s that we don’t actually learn from active suffering.  As LM Browning wrote in To Lose the Madness, “If human beings inherently learned through suffering, we would be a population of enlightened beings and we’re not. We learn from suffering if and only if we manage to transcend our suffering to find meaning in what is otherwise senseless. This process of transcendence is a profoundly human one that imparts the deepest—most lasting—sense of achievement.”

Five years after the illness, which is mostly resolved now, I have no definitive answers or sure-fire solutions for others who are suffering (I’m definitely not an enlightened being), but I have somehow transcended the experience with enough time, self compassion, and patience.  That’s how it is in a human life, as much as we want it to be different.  We want a quick fix, the kind of ‘self care’ that is Instagramable, a pill that will make things better.  I’ve wanted all of those things, and I probably will again in the future.  Now though, instead of trying to find deep meaning in the midst of a challenge,  I try to focus on doing one tiny thing at a time.  I try to offer myself grace. When combined, all of those little things plus gentleness toward the self, invite my body and mind to a place of wholeness–even if it doesn’t include full health or deep insight.   I have continued to write poems, to notice the details, to process how those details interact with my internal dialogue.  And this is, and will always be, a practice of patience.

I read an article by Josh Cohen today about perfectionism, and in it he quotes Moya Sarner saying, “It makes for a thin life, lived for what it isn’t rather than what it is. If you’re forever trying to make your life what you want it to be, you’re not really living the life you have.” Granted she’s talking about “never enoughness” of perfectionism here, but perhaps we can apply it to navigating the hard stuff of life, like illness and grief, too. Life is meant to be full of that which is life-giving. Can we try too hard to overcome the hard stuff? Maybe we can. I don’t know. Maybe trying to squeeze meaning out of every single thing that happens, as it happens, depletes us, makes life thin. Maybe we need to let enough time pass before we go looking for the meaning in a hard experience. Transending suffering can take a while.

What would it take to live the life you have right now, instead of trying to make it into something different, something better, something more than what it is? This is not to say that you can't work toward goals, invest in healing, or make improvements—but it does mean entertaining the possibility of letting go of the constant quest for progress and not always looking for the meaning in an experience right away. What if setting the quest down (even if just for a little while) opened up the space necessary to replenish your strength stores just enough to keep going another day? What if taking a pause—whatever “pausing” means to you— filled life back up again? What does practicing patience actually look like in your life today? (Feel free to share in the comments..I’d love to hear what this brings up for you…)