What if… my only purpose was to learn how to be right here?

From lack to light: a practice.

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A few weeks ago, I was not here at all.

Let’s open a window in the air and go back in time, so you can see how not there I was.

Through the window we go. I am lying in bed, hunched on my side, eyes closed. There is not much else to see. My phone is in easy reach but the fullness and chaos of my thoughts outcompete any social media scroll I could add to it.

When I move or do small things, my eyes are dim, all the spotlights turned in, not out, as I think and think and think. I am clenched and I am unhappy. I run a maze in my own head as if chased. The window might as well be bricked over.

It’s not my fault. I am a human being and I am in a great deal of pain. My muscles have locked themselves up in their tight spastic spasm and I am trapped in their cage. I am riding pitching waves of nausea and I can’t eat. I am stuck in my head, not because it hurts, but because I’m frightened.

Like a discordant, harsh jingle playing on loop I think the same thoughts in a hundred different ways: I have to fix this. I have to fix myself, my life. I need to be safe. I need more… I don’t even know, I just know I don’t have it. How can I get it? Because I have to… I have to get out of this.

Fear likes friends, right? One fear joins another and another as I lie there. I worry about money. What if I continue to not bring in enough to help us? What if the strain of that hurts my partner? I worry about being a terrible disappointment, that nothing I’m doing will be enough. I worry about my book launch. I worry that because I’m not more [healthy, normal, visible, beautiful, exciting, successful, clever, talented, resilient, productive, popular — take your pick] the consequence will be punishment, rejection, being left behind and left out.

Meanwhile, my body is healing from this flare-up, slowly, patiently, beautifully. Meanwhile, everything else waits for me to remember it exists, like a crowd of kindly spirits waiting around my bed.

This is the most human story in the world. Every single one of you would be able to tell me your own version. We’ve all been there. This is suffering. Those of you who know me know I fall into it sometimes. More often, perhaps, than I should.

I tell you this to offer company.

You know this, but these states are hardwired into our biology. We don’t stand much of a chance at resisting them. I love Martha Beck’s description of the most basic, most influential, instinctive part of our brain and its preoccupation with ‘lack and attack’. We are designed to focus in on what we don’t have and what might hurt us, and when that part of our brain sends up the alarm — triggered by a million different things — lack and attack becomes all we can see. The rest of life’s abundance, goodness, hope, opportunity, it all fades away.

I don’t want to live like this, seeing only lack and threat. Do you? Not when life is so much more than this, when I have so much. That’s why I try so hard at trying to live, think, act differently. I don’t want this to be my fate or my response to the world; to forever react to its gifts with fear or demand.

No blame, of course (boring). No grim-faced act of overcoming, thank you (how predictable). No worthy attempts to eliminate this facet of ourselves once and for all (yeah, good luck with that), just something small: an offering.

I’m going to share a practice with you. Not a fix, just a practice. It helped to pull me out of my hole, as it does every time I fall into it. It is simple and it is lovely and I think the purpose of my entire life is to learn how to do it over and over again.