The Gift in the Brokenness
So it turns out after all those scary doctor visits, all I have is mono. At least my gut was right that it wasn’t anything malignant! That whole weeks’ long medical ordeal, in addition to my solo living and a five week sabbatical from Facebook, created space for me to ruminate about two things. The first thing is how do I make sure I always have health insurance? The second thing is thinking about life as a gift.
I have had always had a little trouble seeing life as a gift. It is perhaps my historical propensity to dwell on the negative aspects of my life that has prevented me from seeing life in all its brokenness and imperfection as a “gift.”
Perhaps it has been the cumulative affect of years and years of marketing that has created a void within me, that eternally needs to be filled with stuff that I buy, purchase, or somehow otherwise consume—like alcohol, casual sex, or food. It is a void that I now think doesn’t really exist but nonetheless operates incognito as desire.
I think it is a desire-void. Whatever amalgamation of cultural, familial, and other forces that colluded to create this desire void, I am beginning to recognize it and see life differently. My intentional solitude and the circumstance of my living situation have caused me to experience desire differently.
This is not to say that I am without desire. It is to say that true desires of my heart or spirit seem more like motivations to me now. My heart’s desire feels genuine because I do not experience it as a void. There seems to be a difference in the way I experience some desires which feel more like a hope, a wish, an inspiration, a dream, or a motivation and the way I experience other desires that feel powerful too, but somehow seem to emanate from elsewhere—not necessarily my heart.
I do have a hope for love in my life, a wish for health, inspiration to seek spiritual fulfillment, a dream of my own family someday, a motivation to do better and be better both intellectually and physically. I am lonely sometimes but the true loneliness, when it isn’t amplified by exposing myself to overstimulation (be that friends, Facebook, media or otherwise) is easily quelled by watching one of my favorite movies and cuddling on the couch with my dog. The other type of loneliness seems to be a cultural evaluation of my worth as a human being somehow predicated upon my relationship status on Facebook—and for that desire-void there is no solution but endless (soul-less?) consumption of worldly things.
So I think about the ways I feel broken, I wonder how much is culture or other voices in my being. How much of that sense of brokenness feels artificially created and in what ways am I allowing those expectations or judgments to create feelings of dissatisfaction or un-wholeness or un-worthiness in my being?
We humans are such complex creatures, such existential mutts. We are, each and everyone one of us, a crossroads of family, culture, society, technology, of material and immaterial, of tangible and intangible, of inherited historical legacies and future potential.
I know in thinking about my Dad, there will always be (among other feelings) a true sense of wounded-ness, of loss, of separation and un-ameliorable longing and despair even. I can’t say that I have, as of yet, have figured out what to do about that except to cry…and then cry some more, to talk about it with those that I can, to write about it in ways that make sense, and then to cry some more.
Yet somehow in the past few months, I have for perhaps the first time in my life just begun to understand how to tell the difference though between my true wounded-ness and judgments of the outside world. I have known this intellectually since I was a child, but there is a difference between intellectually knowing and feeling it.
In recognizing how to feel and know, that difference life has become a gift. It is only because it is a gift that I mourn so deeply the loss of the gift of my Dad’s life.
Perhaps the gift comes in the feeling/knowing that we do heal from true wounded-ness. We can heal; that healing is possible, never easy and we are always whole—even when it doesn’t feel that way. Desire-voids have been created in us to get us to buy stuff but we don’t need to buy anything to be worthy of love, whole, and part of the human family. We are each and every one of us wounded and whole, and a gift nonetheless.
- Impatient with Waiting - December 1, 2016
- Cultivating the Courage to Act - April 1, 2016
- The Hope of OurAncestors - December 1, 2015
