The Vigorous Pursuit

Today is the anniversary of my lung reinflation procedure. In almost every respect, that procedure put me in a completely different place today as compared to a little over a year ago. It's probably typical that I believe most of the changes are positive ones. However, I'm still left with some negative feelings and certainly some emotional hangups.

I feel vulnerable, and I can't get around it. Obviously, I've always been vulnerable, but the collapse really made it tangible for me. Whether or not my vulnerability was tangible to others is really beside the point. It's not exaggerating to say that until I underwent the procedure, I truly was not aware of my vulnerability. I already knew how precious life was and I had a very healthy, and unusual for this society, view of death. But I finally got an in-your-face example of how fragile the human body really is. It is an emotional realization. Not only are there untold forces outside of my control, but those forces can hurt me and the ones I love. A pessimist could have a field day with that statement. However, I actually took a lot of good from it. I feel more alive now that I've had that realization.

I have always believed in enjoying life and being happy. What changed in me is that I have accepted wanting to feel good. I embrace my desire. That thing about suffering being caused by desire can be confusing. I realize now that it is not a teaching that shows me how to remove suffering from my life. Rather, it is a statement about the human condition. For all the pain and fragility we endure in our bodies, simply being alive also affords us so much pleasure. I choose, now, to indulge in it happily and without remorse. More of us should do that, I think.

My choice to accept the desire to feel good has made me even more optimistic and given me a ton of self-confidence. Granted, none of this happened overnight and my ideas here have been tested many times. It did take the whole year. Since the year has passed, I have grown in my self-acceptance and I don't find too many situations in which I feel uncomfortable.

When it comes down to it, the emotional vulnerability caused by the collapse can only be cured by me. For better or worse, the memories of the procedure itself will always be with me. The fear of it happening again will only go away with time. The emotions are also connected to me physically by all the parts of my body involved in fixing the lung collapse. My skin, my chest, my muscle tissue there, and that part of my lung, those things also physically feel vulnerable. It is difficult to describe and primarily psychological, but it is there. Every once in a while, little pains come back, just like memory flashes of the procedure.

Some of my emotional vulnerability cannot, or better yet should not, be cured. When time begins to move us away from a major event in our lives, whether it is a trauma or some special occasion, it is inevitable that we revert to an everyday routine style of living. In that regard, I almost feel like I am more alive during my crises than most other times. My emotions were very close to the surface around the time of the collapse. Now, it makes me glad to experience strong emotion. For instance, I actually feel good after some song or film moves me to tears. I certainly don't want to cure that. My emotions are my connection to the times in my life in which I feel most alive.

I have grown in my fondness for the people I love. Appreciating them is something I have always done, but I feel like I am now more consciously aware of the delight I take in my relationships with them. I know what it is to enjoy their enjoyment, to feel achievement in their achievements, and to be happy because of their happiness. In most of the aspects of my life, quantity is something I hardly experience. It's all about quality. I don't have an enormity of close friends I would call brother, or sister, or lover. I don't get to see them terribly often. So, I make up for it by maximizing every moment we spend together which allows those relationships to be enriched in a truly special way. I see my family more often, but I put the same spiritual energy into the maximizing and the enriching.

One thing that has not changed over this year is my love of writing. It has increased, increased, increased exponentially. I think the crux of this thought and all of the thoughts I have had about my anniversary is that I feel affirmed. My way of life, my beliefs, my current place, my direction, my character, all of these things have been affirmed in me. After much thought this year, I have discovered that writing is my vocation. It was simply something I was good at until 2004. That year it became an interest and an intense hobby. In 2005, I changed it to my major in college and in the fall of that year my fate was sealed when I took Intro to Creative Writing. Writing had become my occupation by the fall of 2006. And now, I can feel deep down that I am called to write.

I wrote before that a pessimist could have a field day with the idea that we can be hurt by so many uncontrollable forces, and that includes other human beings. I can understand why that looks negative at face value. Digging deeper, however, look at all the good. It is completely useless for me to worry about those things I cannot control. Imagine how liberating it is, then, to accept that there are all those forces out there and stop stressing about them. Imagine all the time and energy saved that can now be used for better things. The preciousness of life, the realization that, in a split second, everything could end or change makes it so easy to live in the moment. I'm all for giving up on guilt and instead focusing on how special it is to get to see this universe. The wonder it offers us is amazing and it should be enjoyed with exuberance.

The best thing we can do is to acknowledge it all because all of it is necessary. Know that bad things threaten us, realize our precarious position, and appreciate the good that makes it worth while. I really mean it when I write: it's all good. We need one thing to understand the other. Be glad that this world is so fragile, for it gives us the passion to delight in its pleasure.

Life is the vigorous pursuit.