They're all going out on me at once. I feel like a jalopy that gets a flat and just when I get the spare tire on, the door falls off or the spark plugs (do cars still have spark plugs? I think not) get fouled...or something. Went in for surgery today on my knee and it hurt like a m--well, it hurt. A lot. And this was just orthoscopic surgery, mind you, the outpatient kind where the doc goes in and repairs some cartilage and gets rid of whatever it was that grated, bone on bone, when I walked downstairs. The other knee needs work, too, or will eventually. Plus I now have arthritis in my lower back and in my neck. All of this would get ever so much better if I lost weight, which is hard to do when it hurts to walk around. Hence the surgery(ies).
Not a fun week.
But I have to keep in mind why I'm doing it: to get back on my exercise program, to feel better, to get rid of pain instead of just quietly succumbing to it, to remember what it is to walk for five miles and not have to limp home. I have two kids, for Chrissake! I can't get old right now! There's a lot of running around I have to do yet! I have a neighbor across the street who's had trouble with his knees, too, and I saw him a week after far more serious surgery, slowly making his way up the hill with a walker. This is a guy I usually see on a bike. I know he didn't particularly relish the thought of hobbling up the street looking with a walker, wearing those lovely white stockings they give you to keep the blood from pooling in your veins, but by God he was out there, using those muscles...and now he's back on his bike. He's 10 years older than me and if he can do it, I can too.
My Buddhist friend writes, "I see the journey toward wholeness as really just a journey of remembering who we really are, down deep." This is not easy when you were raised on a diet of "You are going to hell if you don't shape up"....the plight of Fundamentalists everywhere, in any variety of religions. I would say that whoever introduced that notion, all these thousands of years, ago, was immensely Fucked Up (except of course in Buddhist thought they can't be, because in Buddhism, my friend tells me, human beings are all perfect and whole and interconnected already. This is a conundrum, which maybe somebody, someday, will explain to me). "This is known as Big Mind in Zen....So you are in the perfect place, in the perfect situation to do the practice you need to do! Everything that is presenting itself to you is there by design. It is a grand opportunity."
Okay, I'll buy that last part. I will do this. I will. Right after two more Percocet.