Looking for the Light at the Edges

Recently, I wrote about The Gift of Not Belonging and a word I fell a little bit in love with: otrovert. Not quite an introvert. Not quite an extrovert. Both. Someone who can love a room full of people and also desperately need the quiet of an empty one.

I like the freedom in that word. The permission not to choose one side of ourselves and make it the whole story.

And lately I’ve been thinking that perhaps happiness deserves the same kind of nuance. I think most people who know me would probably describe me as a happy person. I would describe myself that way, too.

But that doesn’t mean I am always happy.

It doesn’t mean I wake up every morning bursting with gratitude, that nothing bothers me, or that I’ve somehow figured out how to float above the things that hurt everyone else. I get scared. I get angry. I get frustrated. I worry about my kids and my grandson, and the people I love. I lie awake sometimes replaying things I can’t fix. And sometimes I am simply pissed off.

You just don’t necessarily see those moments on Facebook.

Social media gives us little illuminated windows into one another’s lives. We see the sunsets, the flowers, the first days of school, the vacations, the kayaks slipping across beautiful water. Those things are real. They’re just not the only things that are real.

I’ve tried over the years to share some of the difficult parts of my life, too, but I’m certainly not shouting every disappointment from the rooftops. Most of us aren’t. So when we look at someone else’s life and think, Everything always seems to work out for her, we should remember that we’re seeing a few illuminated windows in a very large house. There are rooms we know nothing about.

This summer has reminded me of that over and over again. I was traveling through some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen when the brakes went out in Prince Edward Island. There is nothing quite like being surrounded by all that beauty and suddenly realizing the thing that’s supposed to stop your car isn’t doing its job. There were travel hiccups, unexpected expenses and ordinary aggravations that didn’t make it into the photographs I posted later.

Then there are the things that aren’t ordinary aggravations at all. People in my circle are walking through losses of their own. Even after all these years, I miss my mom and dad. I miss the people I’ve loved who aren’t here anymore. Grief changes shape over time, but I don’t think love ever gets the message that it’s supposed to stop missing someone.

I still can’t quite wrap my mind around my friend Lori’s death and how quickly someone can go from being woven into the ordinary fabric of our lives to simply not being here anymore.

I remember reading something once about death being a gift. I can’t remember who said it, and I’m not even sure those were the exact words. It sounds almost cruel because there is nothing that feels like a gift when someone you love dies.

But as I’ve gotten older, I think I understand what the writer might have meant. Death removes the illusion that any of us have been promised tomorrow. You can walk through a door one afternoon and, before you walk back through it, life can change. One phone call. One test result. One accident. One moment.

Maybe that is the strange and unwanted gift hidden inside our awareness of death. It makes us pay attention to the living.

My own body has been giving me a few reminders about that lately, too. While I was in Maine, I woke in the middle of the night with severe pain across my chest and left shoulder. It was the kind of pain that wakes you completely, when the darkness and stillness of the room suddenly feel different because you’re wondering, Is this something? Do I need to go to the ER?

I’d been dealing with pain around that shoulder for quite a while, but this felt different. I was supposed to go to yoga the next day and decided not to. I waited another day, then went back. I stretched, breathed and moved carefully, paying attention to what hurt and what didn’t. The movement actually seemed to help.

About a week later, Bob and I were in New Hampshire. Because apparently my shoulder needed another challenge, I managed to fall in the bathtub and land right on it. I can laugh about the absurdity now, but there was nothing funny at the time about landing on the exact part of my body that had already been trying so hard to get my attention.

Still, I didn’t stop moving through my life while I waited to understand what was happening. I went kayaking.

I’ve continued to paddle throughout all of this, including several times while dealing with the shoulder pain. I haven’t ignored it, but I also haven’t wanted pain to become the only thing I noticed.

Kayaking (and paddle boarding) has always felt like meditation to me. There is a moment when the shoreline gets farther away and everything quiets down. The kayak rocks slightly beneath me. My paddle breaks the surface, catches the water and pulls me forward. Droplets run down the shaft toward my hands. I feel the cool air on my face and smell the trees along the shoreline. Pull. Glide. Pull. Glide. My breathing settles into the rhythm.

And there I was in New Hampshire, right in the middle of that meditation, when Bob began having severe muscle spasms out on the water. At first, I thought he was just slapping the water with his paddles, then I realized it was the waving arms of distress.

Suddenly, the peaceful paddle wasn’t peaceful at all. We didn’t know exactly what was happening or whether this was going to end with an emergency room visit. Bob was hurting, we were sitting in kayaks out on the water, and everything that had seemed important a few minutes earlier suddenly wasn’t.

Thankfully, it all ended up being okay.

I’ve thought about the contrast of that moment since then. One minute I was listening to the dip of my paddle and feeling completely present in one of the places where I feel most peaceful. The next, I was worried about someone I love. Same lake. Same trees. Same beautiful New Hampshire sky. Completely different moment.

Maybe that’s life in miniature. The peaceful water doesn’t disappear because something frightening happens on it. And the frightening thing doesn’t mean the water wasn’t beautiful.

Both were true.

Not long after I returned home from that trip came another night when I shot upright from sleep with pain that frightened me enough to wonder if I was having a heart attack. That same night, my son and his girlfriend Sophia came to my bedroom door to let me know her dad had been in a motorcycle accident and they were on the way to the hospital. He had broken both major bones in his leg. It felt as if reminders of how vulnerable our bodies are were everywhere.

Later, that same night, I drove myself to San Ramon Regional because the pain in my chest and shoulder had become frightening enough that I needed to know the source of the pain. There was an EKG, a CAT scan, an X-ray, and then the waiting. Anyone who has sat in a hospital room knows that particular kind of waiting. Footsteps in the hallway. Machines beeping. Voices outside the room. You wonder what someone is going to say when the door opens.

Thankfully, it wasn’t my heart.

The pain appeared to be coming from somewhere around my shoulder, and that’s where fear began turning into frustration. For years I had been telling my doctor, Something is wrong with my shoulder.

She attributed it to degenerative arthritis originating in my neck, and here’s the thing, she wasn’t entirely wrong. I do have arthritis. My neck does cause problems. But I live inside this body, and this felt different. I had asked for an MRI more than once in the past few years because I believed there was something mechanical going on that we weren’t seeing.

At my last appointment, when I once again heard the familiar recommendations about physical therapy and videos, something in me had enough. I looked at the doctor who had cared for me for twenty years and said, “I don’t think you’re listening to me.”

And on the spot, after twenty years, I broke up with my doctor.

The next day I made an appointment with someone new. I wasn’t demanding a diagnosis or trying to prove anyone wrong. I told her I needed to feel listened to. I understood my neck could contribute to pain, but I believed something else was happening inside my shoulder. I wanted an MRI.

Eventually, I got it.

And there it was in black and white. A partial tear of the infraspinatus tendon. Tendinosis in the infraspinatus and subscapularis, along with tendinosis of the long head of the biceps tendon. Fraying of the superior labrum. Fluid in the bursa. And a 2 cm lesion in the supraspinatus muscle described as suggestive of a cyst.

There were degenerative changes, too. I knew there would be. I’m sixty years old and I have arthritis. I wasn’t trying to prove that my neck and arthritis had nothing to do with my pain.

I was trying to say they weren’t explaining all of it.

There was something incredibly validating about seeing those words on the page. Not because I wanted anything to be wrong with me. I didn’t. But because I had known this pain felt different. After years of saying something was wrong with my shoulder, there it was. I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t overreacting. I knew my own body.

I’ll admit there was a tiny, not particularly enlightened part of me that wanted to send the MRI report to my former doctor with some expletives and three words: I KNEW IT.

I didn’t.

Being right isn’t the point. Figuring out what to do next is the point. But the experience reminded me that gratitude and positivity do not mean passivity. Sometimes loving your life means advocating for it. Sometimes it means saying, “No, listen again.” Sometimes gratitude looks less like a thank-you note and more like refusing to give up on yourself.

So why am I telling you about bad brakes, a bathtub fall, a frightening moment on the water, emergency rooms, motorcycle accidents, grief, doctors and an MRI in a piece about happiness?

Because this is what I mean by happiness.

Bad things happen to all of us. Being a good person doesn’t somehow give you a protective coating that keeps tragedy, illness, money problems, heartbreak, accidents, disappointment or grief from finding you. I’ve raised two boys. I grew up with two brothers. I have friends I adore. I’ve watched people I love over and over make their way through things I desperately wished I could fix for them, and I’ve learned that most of the time, I can’t.

My boys will continue to find their own way through a life that will give them breathtakingly beautiful moments and moments that break their hearts. So will I. So will you.

I don’t know if some people are chemically wired to notice what’s working while others immediately see what’s wrong. Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe it’s personality. Maybe it’s what we’ve lived through. Maybe it’s practice. Probably some combination of all of it.

But there seems to be something inside me that keeps searching for the silver lining. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the dark cloud. I absolutely see the cloud. I just don’t want to miss the light at its edges.

Sometimes that light is incredibly ordinary. It’s opening my sliding door early in the morning and feeling the cool air touch my face. It’s hearing the birds, especially the three owls who seem to have taken up residence nearby and apparently have quite a lot to discuss in the early morning hours. It’s pulling a warm blanket around myself and lingering there a little longer than I probably should.

It’s an iced chai. The first notes of a song I love. A sentence in a book that makes me stop and think. Something on a podcast that stays with me. It’s meeting a friend and realizing two hours disappeared because we never stopped talking. It’s hearing Bob’s voice on the phone.

And it’s putting a kayak into the water. The cool air, the smell of trees, the droplets sliding down the paddle onto my hands. Pull. Glide. Pull. Glide. For a little while, nothing needs to be solved.

Maybe that’s why I love solitude as much as I love people. It’s where I notice things.

And maybe noticing is really the word I’ve been looking for all along.

Maybe gratitude isn’t a personality trait, and happiness isn’t something you either have or don’t have. Maybe gratitude is the practice of noticing what is still good while everything else is also happening. Not after the problem is solved. Not when everyone you love is safe. Not when your body stops hurting or your children have figured everything out. Not when the bills are paid, the brakes work and nobody you love is in a hospital.

Now. While it’s happening.

The grief and the owls. The emergency room and the kayak. The aching shoulder and the warm blanket. The frightening moment on the water and the beauty of the water itself. The dark cloud and the light around its edges.

Maybe we’re all a little bit otravert in that way, too. Maybe two seemingly opposite things can be true at once. I can be scared and grateful. I can be grieving and still laugh. I can be angry about what is wrong and amazed by what is right. I can have pain in my shoulder and still feel the sun on my face. I can know life can change in a heartbeat and refuse to spend all of my time being afraid that it will.

So yes, I think I am a happy person, but not because bad things don’t happen to me. They do. Not because I don’t hurt. I do. And certainly not because I’ve figured out some secret the rest of the world hasn’t.

I think I’ve simply learned, perhaps through age, perhaps through loss, and perhaps through practice, to pay attention. To open the door and hear the owls. To call the friend. To get in the kayak. To speak up when something isn’t right. To love people while they’re here. To notice the warmth of the blanket.

To look directly at the cloud and, whenever I can, find the light at its edges.