There are always limits!Back in the hospital, I waited to learn which hand I'd been dealt. Chipper in the cardiac ward, there was only a single fly in my ointment: The God Damned Charging Cord.
I will never be a point guard for the NY Knicks. I could be compelled to frown about that suspended dream if I were to focus on it. And I could descend into bitter basketball drama if I held it close day after day while making toast and tying shoelaces. In fact, that's what most people do. They obsess over limitations, suspended dreams, and suboptimalities.
People live in a world of What Isn't, and I, too, indulged in that self-torture until one night I caught myself flipping between the wonderful time I was actually having and a contrived notion of what could have been happening and should have been happening. It stunned me to watch myself struggling to determine the appropriate framing. As if there were a real quandary.
After that revelation, I found it surprisingly easy to opt out of What Isn't. And when the only game in town is to play the cards you're dealt, life improves tremendously. But that's not what this posting is about.
In that moment, my life revolved around my iPad, because it was literally all I had. Aside from one friendly nurse, there was little for me to curiously probe or engage with—certainly no eateries to explore—outside my bed, where I was firmly stuck. And in that twin-sized world were precisely two things:
1. My iPad (for entertainment, information, communication, cardiac tutorials, and fun games).Re: #2, I wasn't about to meditate, or mess with my breathing, or anything like that, because I was essentially covered with police tape. This body of mine was not cleared for tampering.
2. A body with an alien monster grumbling in its chesty regions.
So my universe was the iPad, and The God Damned Charging Cord would not reach the outlet. So I needed to periodically charge it while it was poised on a ledge, and this required leaning over hard with an IV drip pulling at my opposite arm as it delivered the nitroglycerin keeping me (not to be melodramatic) alive. Plus, I needed to acrobatically bend over and around, as an unfamiliar internal voice, with the hesitance of an entity unaccustomed to speaking up, cleared its throat and politely questioned my life choices:
"Hey, uh, are you sure this is a good idea, bud?"It took a few paragraphs, but hopefully I've persuaded you that, deep in the cardiac ward, I was plagued by one single legit problem. It was a "mere" charging cord, but its significance, both for peril and for deliverance, was gigantic.
Aside from that, I was ready for test results, and for a plastic squib to be pushed through my circulatory system to lodge open a critical artery. In fact, I was so amiably game that the head nurse (not the nice one) sent a social worker to attempt to ease the oblivious slob into accepting the gravity of his situation. If she had been aware of how The God Damned Charging Cord was oppressing me, she'd have had me sent straight to the psych ward.
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm immensely adaptable about big things yet oddly petty about small things. Pondering this, I've decided it's about life scale. If your life is big—you're busy, or dreamy, or have lots of pots on the stove and irons in the fire—you live in a vastly different universe than if your life is more lifesized. A sufficiently small life can revolve entirely around The God Damned Charging Cord, however odd that might seem to a harried cardiac nurse, or to a reader unprepared by paragraphs of psychological self-explanation.
Since I don't occupy myself with what's not happening, or make myself miserable over contingencies, my life gets extremely small. Drama is for larger livers. Most of us swell with vexations, resentments, fears, and thirsts. These "big canvas" tools stretch life fabric to distant horizons, framing out expansive MacMansions of Hell, well-stocked with construction materials for more additions.
In the hospital, I stuck out among hordes of teary, petrified patients beset by emotional turbulence, but this represented the opposite of superiority. They were the ones with great big lives, undergoing monumental events, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, while I was left in the dust, plotting my ratty little tactics re: The God Damned Charging Cord which—in the absence of heroic derring-do and epic tragedy—represented my entire pathetic little universe.
Everlasting gratitude for my friend Dave who brought a longer cord on day two. After that, all was well. The stent's been fine, too. Heart stuff is not what you think it is.Let's call it the Shrunken World Scenario. For one thing, it explains why small children get hysterical over lost balloons. Kids have fabulous imaginations, but they don't use them to contrive grand grown-up predicaments. In their small worlds, a balloon looms large. So they are not wrong to mourn it.
The Shrunken World Scenario also explains the elderly propensity for staring placidly into space. It's not always a matter of frailty or dementia. They've seen through fake drama, ceased obsessing over "what's missing," and begun wave-riding. Those internal processes reduce external engagement and shrink lives. We don't send a social worker when grandpa keeps his powder dry amid adversity, because it's normal behavior at that age. Yet despite the overarching equanimity, old people can be notoriously petty. I’ve explained why. Within small lives, a tablecloth stain or leaky faucet looms awfully large.
When I moved to Portugal, I discovered that the old friends I'd arranged to temporarily stay with were vicious late-stage alcoholics. I endured this (and other chaos) while living out of a small suitcase as my possessions slowly drifted toward me via the world's slowest container ship. For some mysterious reason, I'd brought along, as my sole discretionary object, my favorite baseball card of my favorite player (Tom Seaver, 1970), and as I spent countless hours sitting in my parked car seeking refuge from the madness, Seaver's confident countenance stared encouragingly from the dashboard. Within the minuscule universe of that car cabin, the petty token had real power.
From 1997 to 2005, I endured a very different sort of trouble. Big Life trouble, running an enormous web community without revenue or seed money or tech help or really anything aside from my wits and adrenal glands. Eventually, moderators volunteered, thank God, but by then I was working eight full-time jobs, unpaid, for the endeavor, with more pots on the stove and irons in the fire than any human being should endure.
In that predicament, no dumb charging cord could bother me, and no lousy baseball card could help.
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