Conscious Departures

Distracted From Ourselves November 17, 2012

I was just in Brighton, UK, on business for a week. Winter is not exactly the best season to be there but I do happen to enjoy Brighton anytime of the year. It’s one of those cities where you can live perfectly well without a car. The public transportation is prolific, regular and predictable and many areas of town are pedestrian biased with charming surroundings. I usually leave there feeling more fit and healthy than when I left. The cool, moist sea air cleans out the dust I’ve accumulated in my lungs from desert living and there are enough hills to get one’s heart pounding. Great food abounds. Yet unlike NY or San Francisco, Brighton center is smaller and more manageable. There are many narrow streets filled with one-of-a-kind shops and surprises around every corner or tucked away in some unsuspecting alley way. People fill the streets in the evenings and all day on weekends. Friends sit outside of the pubs or cafés bundled up chatting while families stroll along looking like they are having a great time. Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?

As is my routine, I went out early each morning when the streets are empty, to have a brisk walk and to get caffeinated at one of the coffee houses I frequent. After six days of gloom and rain the sun finally broke through one morning. When the sun peeks out, even a tiny bit, it’s celebrated as if it were the liberation of a country from years of bitter tyranny. Even in 48 degree weather people will be out in droves wearing shorts. I even saw a couple of people trooping around in nothing more than a T-shirt that day.

After my morning coffee, I left that wonderful section of town, called the Lanes, and made a left turn onto a main road almost colliding with a young woman rushing to get somewhere. She was wearing rather large headphones connected to a device hidden in her pocket; a smart phone I suspect. She seemed decisively cut off from the world. I was barely noticed and not acknowledged. It got me thinking.

My thoughts on such walks are usually all over the place but in their own fascinating way they always seem directed towards working things out or trying to come to greater understandings. For instance, I was planning to bring K along with me this year and while walking around town, every time I’d pass something that I really liked, I would get excited about sharing it with her – that is until I realized it will never be. I kept going through that thought process over and over again understanding a little more deeply each time that it would never come to pass. My thought pattern was part of a greater process of learning to accepting my loss and no direction was needed from me. In the quiet, distraction free periods of my walk the internal work I needed to do happened quite naturally. And it felt so good.

There was an article I came across recently about how, according to one nurse who specializes in caregiving end of life patients, grieving is a process in which a person seeks equilibrium. Normalcy.  She even refers to the bereavement stage as the creation of a “new normal” ; a kind of homeostasis. I really like that word homeostasis. At its Greek root “stasis” means “standing still”. It’s while standing still that one can observe with greater precision what’s going on.

We live at a time when it’s far too easy to distract ourselves, be in constant motion and not allow a natural inner process to happen. The result is that we give up a lot.  With the process I went through being a care-giver and a constant companion to another human being, I certainly could have benefitted from more quiet time with myself. There’s a time for distraction, but the insights that come as a result of “being still” are invaluable. It’s sometimes scary to be silent and alone with one’s self, but maybe it’s because we’ve made it such a foreign part of our lives. I remember times visiting my father and how uncomfortable he would be if we weren’t discussing something or busy. I spent a day with him once and I swear he spoke virtually non-stop from 9:00 am in the morning until I dropped him off at his home later that night. Whenever there was a moment of silence he just had to break it. On his way out of the car he said to me “You talk so little!”

It is so easy with our myriad devices to plug in, turn on and tune out around the clock whenever the discomfort of silence overtakes us. Ha! I not only travel with a laptop and smart phone now, but I also carry a tablet! How nuts is that?

Now that K is gone I find myself spending plenty of time alone and in complete silence. In the quiet I find I can more easily review what happened and see things that I hadn’t noticed before. I don’t try to do this, it’s automatic when not distracted from myself. I am now seeing things that could have made the end of life process and care-giving even more meaningful and warm for K and myself. I could have seen it then if I had given myself the space. Now it does no one any good. I don’t feel I’m beating myself up over this, I’m simply recognzing the value of the time we can spend with our self and how much it can reveal to us.

Our natural internal intelligence is an incredible gift and seems to have an extraordinary ability to take in a wealth of information and, if left alone, will in some mysteriously way make sense of it and show us our next step or reveal what it is we’ve been trying to see all along. It really amazes me. Have a happy Homeostasis.