The Water Table of the Human Condition

"You took it all, but I'm still breathing." 

Okay so, Sia has been on repeat IRL and also in my head for a bit now. She's really climbing the ladder of my cool list. This line has been tumbling around in my head for the past few weeks, from one of her newest songs called "Alive". I didn’t start singing along as a self pep-talk, it's just been in my mind like a welcomed ear worm. Then I realized this morning how much this lyric is saying about my life. Blah blah blah cancer you absolutely sucked everything out of me, but in spite of your efforts, I'm still freaking ALIVE.

Cancer takes a lot. I'm actually just sitting here at my desk with what’s probably a pretty blank expression on my face because I'm not sure what to follow that statement with. Yeah, it takes a lot. It takes away a lot of things, it takes a lot out of you, and it takes a lot of who you are. There were a good 7-10 months when I thought my personality was literally dead. Like, gone forever. I didn't think I had anything left inside me, at all. I am not exaggerating. I felt like a stupid hollowed log of a fallen tree rotting into the ground. Although it didn’t feel even that poetic; and that's not even good poetry to start with. I certainly couldn't have accurately explained how I felt at the time because it escaped words. Maybe I'm trying to explain it now. And maybe you are yourself at a place where you feel this way- cancer patient or not. I’m learning that this is a very real human experience. The experience of fear which often gives way to a dispassionate sensation that’s the one step past terror: a coping mechanism where your emotions just shut off as you watch everything you thought defined you slip away like the smoke of a blown out candle.

I've come away from my experience (haha. "come away" like it's over or something.) with cancer with a hugely expanded respect for the human condition. And I mean that in many ways. Philosophically, the human condition is defined as the essences of human existence: what it means to be a human. It often paints a picture of existential meaning, morality, mortality, etc. It's one of the reasons I am drawn to philosophy; I am sort of cursed with eternal existential crisis. But the respect I now have for the human condition has grown considerably: most notably the interminable human imagination in dealing with conflict. Whether that conflict is in relation to yourself, other humans, the world, or stupid, stupid fast-growing mutant cells that just wanna kill you. The ability of the human spirit to bushwhack through insane circumstances is, honestly, pretty damn impressive. I certainly don't claim to have survived humans' greatest plight or anything, but I have definitely experienced a level of existential (and while we're at it, physical) pain that I had not even touched the surface of before. Whether or not my actual experience is on "level" with some of the most horrific circumstances a human can go through (I don't believe it is. What with the Holocaust, genocide, refugee camps, bombings, child hunger, orphanages, lack of clean water, losing a child; the list marches sadly on and on), I do believe that I have tapped into the water table of the human condition a bit. 

When we experience something horrific- and no person is exempt from this- we tap into that deep flowing river of muck water. We experience the same feelings of so many people have who have gone before us. In a way, it's like a horrifying rite-of-passage to becoming a human being. Again, I'm talking from my own experience here, but I see this imagery in my mind so clearly: It’s like a dark undercurrent of filth that flows beneath the surface of what we imagine life to be before real stuff starts happening. It’s just straight manure, blood and tears surging along under the crust we walk with our baby soft feet. And then something happens and we dip our toes (or wade in waist-deep- what’s the difference, really?) into that murky shit water and it never seems to fully wash away. And the current is strong, and the sewage is thick and disgusting and grips us like a crocodile death roll. It takes us down and it appears to be infinite.

I’ve talked about water before: it’s fluidity of states-of-being, its cleansing and life-giving properties, and the endless cycle it run through on our planet since the beginning of time. But now I’m adding water into the dirty part of living too, and it’s powerful there too. Take drinking water, for example. Millions of people in the world are unable to have clean water in their lives. And as I sit here at my desk while my stomach is telling me I’m slightly hungry and like, yay instagram- it’s hard to fathom that children are dying because the water they have access to is non-potable. It’s filled with dirt and disease. And that changes their lives- shortens them, certainly. There is so much pain. What an unfathomable thing. Our bodies are about 60% water. Blood is 90% water. Our brains and muscles are 75% water. Even bones are made of water. If you get bad water in there, your body just won’t work.

I’m getting increasingly metaphorical here, but back to my picture: So there’s the dark waters of deep shit, whatever your deep shit is or ever will be in the future, and you’re tainted and it won’t wash out, like Macbeth’s bloody hands. Water is powerful. But I also see that somewhere even deeper, a layer way below the unseemly depths of this wreckage, there’s another, different river surge. Picture a dammed river being released, or the water Arwen calls forth to flush those Ring Wraiths down the toilet of Middle-earth (c’mon let out your inner nerd).

Water is a conqueror. The dirty stuff wants to bring you down and suffocate you. But to live through circumstances that challenge us, even break us- living through them in my mind is diving head first into that polluted H2O, pushing deeper and deeper into the earth of living until you break that barrier into that clear, cleansing, beautiful cascade of water that is the deeper understanding of what it is to be a human being. And that in the interminable human imagination and spirit.

All this rambling has surfaced the words of (what a surprise) Rilke. I absolutely did not have these words in mind when I began writing all of this, but I now find myself stunned at the accuracy to which he is able to capture what I am trying to say. Way to go Rilke, you nailed it again with your concise and heavenly poetics that explain better than I ever could:

You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing
And are raised to the rank of prince
By the slippery ease of their light judgments
But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
To dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

and here’s another translation of the same poem that’s just. omg I’m on the floor. the. floor. hnnnngggg

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.
So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.
But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

Thirst. Light and darkness. Diving into depths. Drinking in life. Water.

“Hi my name is Rainer Maria Rilke and I’d just like to say: You are not dead yet, and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.”

*pauses for effect* *drops mic*

Day 465: 2014, an epilogue

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - Kelly Clarkson/Nietzsche 
"hahaha" - Life

I was talking with a friend a few days ago; one of those precious friends that no matter how long it is between seeing each other, you pick right up again and dive into soul ponderings and somehow find that you are on the same page. We discovered that 2014, a year on its way out, had really been one of (if not exclusively) the toughest year on our personal records. She shared some hard things that I had missed because of my own life dealings the past two years. Though it had been a while since we had been able to really reconnect, and even though our stories are different, we share a common thread in many ways. We both had been shaken, hard—and honestly, broken. We both realized that in hard times before this there had always been a silver lining; or at least, hope—in spite of it all. But something happened.

Whether it was a explicit event, or a mudslide combination of many experiences, something deeply changed. The world went from being something that was fundamentally good where bad things sometimes happen—to being fundamentally bad where good things sometimes happen. My intuition had never been so wrong. I have never felt this way before. This shift was unwanted, unwarranted. It just happened, like part two of what happened to me late in college: after 20+ years of understanding the universe in one such way, I slowly realized that something had derailed in me: that some fundamental things didn’t make sense anymore. I’m going to pull an excerpt from a piece I wrote for a college publication a few years ago, as it describes very well how I felt then:

It’s like a tower of building blocks that we inherit as children; they form a foundation for our understanding of the world. They describe God, Jesus, this little light of mine. They are comforting, they make sense. And I have turned my gaze back to mine only to find they have sort of crumbled to indistinguishable rubble, and there’s some weird dirty animal making a mess of it.

...

There isn’t a specific moment when it happened, when I decided to be where I am now in terms of religion and faith; God or god or the Light or whatever she/he happens to be, if she/he happens to be. It happened over time, which you might think would hurt less—and maybe that’s true. It was a slow and sad realization; as doubts started creeping in, as I grew up, as people I love died. I started feeling uncomfortable sitting in church. I asked questions. I started reading existentialist philosophy (I know, it’s trite). I was trying to look at the world through different lenses than the ones I had inherited. It’s not like reading these things and thinking these thoughts suddenly made me cease to care about God. Quite the opposite. I suddenly found that I cared very much. I cared who this God was, and deeply questioned what I had been told and what I had believed; things were starting to not add up. It wasn’t a fanatical break. In fact, I tried to hold on, for so long. It was slipping away.”

The foundation upon which I had rested all questions, crises, problems and qualms—was crumbled, dismantled. But even then, I was hopeful: though I did not know where the hope was coming from, I believed in a higher love. I believed that the world would eventually right itself through my yearning. Beauty and Forgiveness and Love would be revealed as the first and the last. Even while inside my deepest soul darkness, in time I made my way out, in some manner. Deep down somewhere in my gut, I knew that there was something greater that I was seeking. My wonder and doubts were seeking a higher, or perhaps better described as a more central, essential—beauty and truth and Love. Even if I was unable to hold it within myself. But something changed this year.

With death having been so close and losing myself in so many ways, with family roles shifting through trauma, with abandonment close and far, with so many things that evade words... something happened. I had to leave the job I just started because my body is still too fragile. I watched my expectations for 2014 disintegrate over and over again before my eyes. I felt so much loss. After a long time of trying to just survive it all, I turned around to the foundation that I had been slowly trying to build again over the last four years, only to find that the dirty gremlin was back, breaking even the basic blocks apart, crushing them to dust. In philosophical terms, this is a major disruption of my metaphysics. In layman terms, this ruined my life, again, but worse this time. I didn’t think I could be this wrecked. I never thought anything would truly break me.

I lay in that for a while. It was all I could do. I felt the weakest I have ever felt—psychologically, emotionally, physically. The trifecta of complete powerlessness. I felt the lowest and darkest I have ever imagined. It is beyond words to describe. I felt so far away from everything I had ever believed about myself, who I was, what meaning was. My fabric was torn: not just along the seams, but the integrity of the fabric was dissolved. I lived in the darkness, and I didn’t know how to begin to move out of it. The darkness over there is the same darkness as here. I felt no strength in me to start crawling to re-build. There was no veil between me and thoughts of death. I didn’t move. And it lingered.

I had very hard nights: whether the pain from my body or from my mind, or both. Chemo and GvHD destroyed my tear ducts so I cried without tears. I wanted to die. Life often seemed no more important than death. My mother was there for me, through most of them. She held me. She persisted, longer than anyone else, more than anyone else. She told me: when you are in that place, just remember that I need you. If nothing else can keep you alive, I need you.

With no real direction, I did what I could: each thing a tiny, seemingly inconsequential step. I started moving, even if it was all in the dark—call it fate or destiny; I don’t know that I believe in these things. But things over the past months have come to pass in such a way that it makes me believe that true good things do happen. A few months ago, a close friend visited me and brought with her a zine and ideas of self-care. We talked a lot, and I read the zine for weeks after she left. It inspired me in many ways. The title of this little publication is “The Worth of Water” based upon the quote: “We never know the worth of water until the well runs dry.” This changed me, somehow. I know that I am very affected by what and who is around me, and so I deduced that I had to actively place good things and people around me, in hope that they will influence me for the positive and lead me on a journey back to Love. I tried very hard. Self-care became the lens in which I started to re-interpret the world; a little building block. The truth is that sometimes we run out of water. We just...run out. And that’s when we learn: water is vital. The natural next question is then: What is water? It turns out, water is the perfect motif: it is life-giving, cleansing, reflecting, revealing. It dissolves and moves through hard things, it flows over sharp edges and softens them, it efficiently moves through multiple states of matter in a never-ending natural cycle. Water is basically the shit.

Then another dear friend visited me, and he brought his own story of recent hardship; but he was able to share with me somewhat his pathway out of that darkness. I was very interested in hearing how he saw the world, and we talked about finding happiness—or at least, finding things that make you happy; things that make you believe in something greater and more beautiful than suffering and self-pity. We visited Walden Pond, which was a reminder (a gentle but firm slap in the face) that things endure beyond our bodies, and beyond our minds. The earth regenerates, trees grow, water reflects the sky. I’ll live on this planet for 80 some-odd years, if I’m lucky. Trees are older, and will outlast me. In a great absurdity, this water is simultaneously extremely old and also brand new. Here are the exact same molecules that lived in and nourished a fish 100 years ago, and yet they also just now condensed from a gaseous form and rained from the sky. There’s nothing like nature to remind you that you are a part of a system (divinely guided or not, I withhold conclusion). I can relax about all this heavy stuff for a moment. The calm of the place was comforting, the freshness of new oxygen leaving leaves mixed with the heaviness of being so deeply old. In that moment it didn’t matter if I had ultimate meaning for my tiny self; I was a presence in the world; alive to breathe that oxygen, and to then add moisture back into to the air from my lungs. And we just walked plainly through the woods, commenting on the tree moss and the colors in the water. I feel that I am learning to truly understand what it means to live deliberately, like Thoreau writes: “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

In the weeks following up until now, I have found that self-care is many things: choosing joy being one. But sometimes you can’t even do that. So I started even simpler: making tea, watching You’ve Got Mail, sleeping when and how long I needed to, reading easy books, trying to eat healthy food to fuel my body. Talking about my thoughts to someone. Calling a friend, making cookies, re-discovering poems and listening to music that used to make me believe in something beautiful. Simple and stupid things. I thought: if there is nothing else I can rest upon, I have to start with these small visceral tasks. I am learning how to breathe; which is probably the most corny thing I've ever written and not immediately deleted. But I'm serious. Stop. Take a deep breath, right now. You feel different. It manually relaxes your muscles. When you don't know what to do about anything else, baseline stuff will have to do. I keep catching myself these days, realizing that I've been breathing shallowly, teaspoon by teaspoon of air. And I say to myself: Take a deep breath, right now.

And then another person came into my life. He has challenged me to root out my true motivations, my true thoughts and feelings, my basic desires for life, and then to communicate and follow that as honestly as possible. It has transformed me again. I see myself in a movement forward.

The things I find to be true in this life are mostly absurd. I can’t explain to you exactly why the story of a rebellious Jesus still brings me to tears. Or why Pedro the Lion’s Be Thou My Vision stirs in my stomach. Or how water is both new and old. I can’t explain why the radical notion of Love in all instances resonates true for me. I don’t even know if I could actually stand and act by that notion. Truly horrible things happen, and people choose to do bad things. I don’t know. I have to believe that every human has the capacity for both good and bad; and each has the capacity for Love. Maybe some people give it away. And I don’t know what to do in that instance. I do know that Love looks different in each circumstance, and know I do not understand them all. And yet it is persists in me, it is what I feel to be true. The unattainable goal: altruistic Love. Absurdity. Human beings are appendages of an earthly cycle, and are each intrinsically surprising and unique. Paradox.

“Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity...” A.J. Heschel

Love is like water, I think. So I must learn to be like water: gentle when it needs to be gentle, and a surging flood when it needs to be a surging flood. Be life-giving, nourishing—lift up the heads of people flowers and strengthen people leaves. Clarify, reflect and reveal true things. Dissolve hardened hearts, smooth over sharp bitterness. Sinuously adapt to every situation: be solid when it is cold, liquid when it is warm, and gas when it is hot, and everything in between; don’t worry about change. Water never fears to run out of itself, it is not self-conscious, it has no thought to conserve its energy for some later time when it feels safe. It does not dam itself; it only breaks barriers. It’s absurd that water falling on a mountain makes its way like little fingers through the rock and sand all the way to the water table below the earth. And that is what I want to believe about Love. It is not without effort, rather it is full of pure energy that vibrates back to the beginning of time. It finds the sacred in the mundane. It takes the knowledge of everything that’s happened, and continues in the same resurrection cycle. It is not afraid to expend the energy needed to get where it wants to go. I want to believe in this kind of world again; where there is enough Love; that I don’t need to hold any inside myself for safe-keeping. Give it away, the cup runs over. I hope for even when the lights are out and I can’t see it, that it is there anyway. And when you can’t see anything at all, start small. Take a deep breath, right now.

2015, I have hopes for you. I have dreams, smiles, tears, whispers, laughs and screams for you. I think we will change each other. I will take what you have to give. And I will give you my all.

  

"What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away."

Carl Sagan

“Being human is a surprise, not a forgone conclusion. ... One thing that sets man apart from animals is a boundless, unpredictable capacity for the development of an inner universe. ... Indeed, the enigma of human being is not in what he is but in what he is able to be.”

A.J. Heschel

“the potato said from underground: ‘you’ve got it all turned upside down!’”

mewithoutYou

let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Rilke