In Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, one of her beautiful commentaries on grief, Anne Lamott asks, "Where is meaning in the meteoric passage of time, the speed in which our lives are spent? Where is meaning in the pits? In the suffering? I think these questions are worth asking."
It is now well established that many of us live in an era of surveillance and stress, wherein time is defined typically as precious and fleeting, and life itself is unpredictable, competitive, and scary. Those of us who are already culturally and personally inclined toward worrying and grief (often for very good reasons) have much to learn about strategizing in the face of seemingly unremitting pressures, relentless inventiveness overload, even danger.
A meme that is circulating currently via social media networks notes that wisdom is hard to come by while information is ubiquitous. This dilemma is not just a benefit of being bourgeois or having other forms of advantage, although it certainly is differential in its effects and efficacy.
Sometimes with a goal, among others, of preventing worsening or presumably risky scenarios, the mainstream Western medical world's training leadership socializes its practitioners to engage in vigilance in information gathering, intervention, and ongoing assessment, despite often inadequate time for conversation and other interactions with patients, accompanied by the insurance industry's seemingly unending power to determine whose lives are most valuable and therefore worth preserving and financially reimbursing.
Yes, it is indeed a privilege to have insurance in the first place, and to face at times unwavering anxiety with access to support rather than in isolation, let alone to attempt to live well and with a semblance of contentment with few or no resources. It is a privilege to be alive at all.
Sometimes, I forget this truth. Then, life and death rattle me to the core. In the aftermath of brutal violence in Baton Rouge, Dhaka, Baghdad, Istanbul, Orlando, and elsewhere, as well as recent changes in my private life, a productive grief has begun to awaken in me, shaking fiercely the entitlement from the sleeping branches, throwing the illusions to the curbside adjacent to the surprised trees. No stranger to depression, I am these days experiencing this wholly new kind of grief, borne, for now, out of scratching-at-the-walls and howling transformation rather than via dooming and plummeting despair. This grief species in my emergent internal taxonomy is defined by awakeness and contoured by clarity; in no way does it resemble the funhouse mirror distortion that is or has been my depression.
Speaking of surveillance and medicine, a few weeks ago, I had an "atypical melanocytic proliferation" removed from my wrist. This is medical parlance for defining some kinds of skin cells that are not doing what ordinary, healthy skin is supposed to be doing -- or, as the case may be, supposed to be not doing, under everyday circumstances. One does not take chances, I learned quickly, with an in-between kind of not-okay-ness, neither malignant nor accepted as normal. All the suspicious cells are now gone; the experts are content with my clear, post-surgical margins. I have a courageous and nasty scar that I have named affectionately after the hit Netflix show, Grace and Frankie, because it was with what I call secular grace that all was benign, and the scar looks vaguely Frankensteinian (referencing the beleaguered, so-called monster, not the narcissistic doctor).
Serendipity is my spiritual orientation. I resonate with symbols from disparate while often interconnected fields, all of which have nourished my inner life and enhanced my interactions with others. I love what I understand to be mystical imagery, including from astrology, but not in any deterministic ways. A Gemini, I turned 50 last month. I wonder if the new grief and scar are perhaps twinned birthday gifts from the universe. Two days prior to my birthday, my dear friend Steve Kuusisto, whose every word is a present, noted of the then-healing hole in my arm, "It's just a place for the Zen wind to get through." I'm sure he was right. Gemini rules the wrists. And the lungs. I am learning to breathe through grief in new ways, with and within an aliveness whose velocity and interior elliptical pathways are entirely different from the cadences via which I had up until now defined and prided myself.
In The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Pico Ayer offers, "In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still." Capitalism forwards an agenda of productivity through exploitation. Speed is deified and set up in opposition to sloth and inefficiency, each a kind of heresy. But the sort of despair that defines and undergirds some folks' daily lives may force us to be productive at our peril, particularly if productivity is defined too narrowly.
I am a big fan of abiding by the perception of simultaneous truths. I feel it is possible to be solid and fluid, stoic and open while being in mourning. I mourn with Baton Rouge, Dhaka, Baghdad, Istanbul, Orlando, and so many other places. Grief and rage can at times silence and shut us down, but if rage can be motivating, grief may likewise present itself as a portal. This is the sort of productive grief I am describing, distinct from despair. It is not just through religious teachings or as a consequence of privilege that we might experience a relentless and focused awareness co-existing with and bearing fruit from grief. Such awareness can be directed toward advocacy, justice, love.
As Mother Jones reminds us, "Mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living."