Friends are wonderful

This week I feel so grateful for my friends. On Sunday I was feeling a little lonely and discombobulated, and I felt like opening a bottle of wine so I called my friend and he came and joined me for dinner. We had a great discussion with my son about not sure what, and then my friend and I exchanged relaxing foot massages.

Later in the week I got caught on the far side of the Bay Bridge, having driven around the snapped cable on the way over to the city. Foolishly, I tried to drive back across the same bridge and ended up sitting in traffic for about an hour before being turned around. Friends were making a gourmet dinner using their new wedding gifts, and invited me to join them. We cooked scrumptious butternut squash soup with real nuts in it, duck in pomegranate sauce and brussels sprouts with truffle oil. I must get some truffle oil for the kitchen!

Then today a friend chatted with me on facebook and invited me to a moonlit hike tomorrow night. I hope that pans out! I would love to splash in the ocean at sunset, warm up in the pub with him, and then hike over the cliffs by the moonlight. I hope he picks me up on his motorcycle. That would be so cool...

Knee, Happy New Year

This is my knee, before the surgery I had yesterday. The picture was taken at the ski resort, you will have to imagine the snow. The bones are fine, but I tore my ACL ligament. Now I have a new one threaded inside there, taken from a cadaver and sterilized with gamma radiation. There are 6 holes in the skin. I will spare you the technicolor pictures of the inside of my knee. I am supposed to be able to walk on it with a brace, but it hurts. Maybe tomorrow! Meanwhile, I am icing it using a special machine and writing the alphabet with my toes every hour so my muscles don't waste away.

I am not sure if I should drink champagne tonight on top of the pain meds.

Anyway, I liked this version of Auld Lang Syne (links to Scotland TV):

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie's a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

(According to Wikipedia, these are Robert Burns' original 1788 lyrics)

For some reason everything makes me feel like crying

Maybe its the knee injury
although it doesn't really hurt

Maybe its because my old friend stopped by
and I can call you my friend now
because the whirlwind of emotions I felt a year ago
is gone. We talked. We stroked my dog and cat,
who were sitting on the bed.
My heart pounded when I heard your voice.

I felt teary before, though,
thinking of my friend's kindness
helping me when I was injured,
taking care of me and bringing me stuff.

I cried in the night. Mourning,
perhaps, the loss of freedom.
Like you said, I was lucky
not to have learned to use crutches by our age.
Freedom from blaming myself.
Freedom to dance.

Some Thoughts

Pursuing men is not a worthwhile activity. I feel sorry now for ever having tried it, and although I feel tempted to do it again I am better able to control the impulse. I learned a lot in a year or two of dating. What I learned is that friendship is much more valuable to cultivate. I really needed friends, and it can be hard to turn acquaintanceships from dating into friendships. If I rely on my friends I can avoid pursuing men and all the feelings of loneliness that inevitably arise from this activity.

Facing the Catastrophe

I finished reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's book on stress reduction. Now I have to face the catastrophe of actually writing my dissertation, since I'm done with my self-selected reading list. I wonder whether to go about this by returning to the beginning and summarizing the first book I read, The Worst of Evils (a history of pain relief) or start by summarizing the treatment (Kabat-Zinn's book). It's a lot less scary writing here than opening up a Word document, so I'll start, in the spirit of things, with where I am now.

Kabat-Zinn outlines in his book an 8-week stress reduction class that he taught at Massachusets General Hospital over a period of many years. The first two weeks are devoted to a meditation he developed, called the 'body scan', during which patients notice and feel the sensations in all the parts of their bodies, literally from toe to head, while lying supine on a mat. In the next two weeks, they learn to breathe while doing yoga stretches. The next weeks include sitting meditation, sometimes with a focus on an image of a mountain, or on lovingkindness, or simply breathing. He included guidelines for walking meditation. During the final two weeks of the course, patients practice on their own, first without and then with Kabat-Zinn's meditation tapes. The book is studded with vignettes of patients' miraculous recoveries from pain, or at least regaining control over their lives or learning a new sense of dignity in the face of adversity. Following the chapters describing the different techniques are Kabat-Zinn's views on stress, meditation, mindfulness - all presented in a straightforward manner easily used with a general audience. What impressed me the most was the high rate of continuation with the practice, about 90% of people who attended the course were still practicing 6 months later, 42% 3 years later and 30% 4 years later. I heard from a professional who attended the course that Kabat-Zinn has a profoundly empathic style and a talent for relating personally to each of the students in the class. He must also be very charismatic, to have achieved such a high practice rate at followup, since meditation is hard to practice regularly on one's own. Reading the book makes me want to start a class like that, I think my patients would have a lot to learn from it.

On a more philosophical note, I am not sure about some of Kabat-Zinn's views. He says that we are not our pain, we are not our thoughts - but if so what are we? A disembodied intention, a stream of awareness, a renegade shard of some greater unity? My own view is that I am part of a larger tapestry, but at the same time 'I' am a discrete part of it with ends (birth and death) bound to my body by the reality of my pain, filled with thoughts and feelings that as much as they are shared with others within the cultural milieu are also a defining part of who I am. This doesn't matter so much except that instructions such as 'being in the pain' have to be explained a lot more clearly to someone who believes that there is somewhere else to go.

So this afternoon, instead of facing the catastrophe and beginning to write, instead of resting my knee so that it will heal faster, I went on a lovely leisurely stroll with my friend, up on the Berkeley Fire Trail. This trail was described by Dorothy Wall in her book, Encounters with the Invisible, about her struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In fact, it was where she first met her husband, before the disease overcame her and when she was still able to jog. I felt sad that I couldn't run on the trail, where I have ran many times before. On the other hand, I enjoyed walking hand in hand with my friend, whereas when we run he always runs ahead.

What if, swimming against the tide

What if I had my bike with me that day, and we had gone just a couple of miles further along 2nd St? We would have come to a little beach park, overlooking the bay. I would have swum, like I did there today, maybe you would have swum too. Things might have been different. You wanted someone to come home to, and we could have been that for one another, perhaps... Except that you didn't even acknowledge this was what you wanted, you only projected it onto me, saying it was what I wanted. And I'm not certain it is. It would have been nice, for sure. But I'm pretty happy coming home to my cat and my dog and my kids, listening to Bach really loud and cooking lentil soup like my grandmother used to make it. Yet I still think of you there now, waiting for me on the beach perhaps, not knowing you're waiting just there for some other reason, as I swim back to the shore against the tide, avoiding a trail of jellyfish. I know that reality doesn't work like that, that all the what ifs spangle out in other dimensions only to peter away and they don't generally loop back into this one. What if the jellyfish had stung me on the way out? They might still sting on the way back in. There are other less pleasant what ifs, spreading from our encounter, measured in millimeters rather than miles. Am I condemned to be haunted forever by all the what ifs?

And all the others. You who remembered that I wanted to swim in the bay at midnight and that's why I would like to be where you are now, near the ocean. If I were there with you we could have played hooky and biked to the beach together instead of waiting for the train that is running late. Why do I feel like I've missed the boat and you're on it?

Why does there always have to be a you? Maybe my present happiness is conditional on the one who is always there, just a phone call away. You will never read this, because you think it's silly, and you're probably right. Probably, you will never be here for me to come home to, but you know that I'm here for you. I hope you know that. Thank goodness we've stopped playing at maybe, forgoing the small pleasures of life for the sake of some future that might never happen to either of us, whether each for ourselves or one for the other.