When We Can Make Sense of Nothing….

At 3:35 a.m. on a recent morning, my husband lay on the floor of the family room, the brace that held the tendon surgery he’d had 12 hours earlier, shattered.  Blood, a confusion of crutches and the sheets from our efforts at a makeshift sleeping nook, sprawled everywhere.

Calmly, ably, the EMTs arrived, strapped him into a transport, grabbed his discharge paperwork, and set out into the rainy pre-dawn dark for the Emergency Room.

I arrived a half an hour (and a load of laundry, and one of dishes) later.  While they performed whatever tasks they were doing in a bay on the far side of the massive, official ER doors, I sat down to watch yellow and purple fish drift in a large tank that had been installed in the sepulchral waiting area.

Though it was only July 8, summer had ended.  Normalcy, too.  In a while, I knew, I would be allowed into the inner sanctum of the quiet ER to sit with him.  But I’ve lived long enough, and have been in this particular place often enough to want to linger in its folds before taking my place in the events that awaited me on the other side of the doors, in the hours and days that lay ahead.

In that orange plastic chair, wearing my yoga pants, sneakers, and a sweater, my hair quickly swept out of the way, I was invisible.  I occupied a kind of limbo, a state of complete and total rupture — on the one hand, from the comfortable “familiar” and predictable, and on the other, from the gaping expanse of the crisis.  This is a borderless territory where anything and everything can happen, and where no attempt to make sense of things suffices.  There is nothing on earth available to appease the Self, in the sudden, inexorable revelation of its powerlessness.

I think of the many family members who have occupied this exact place during the pandemic, of those who similarly sit in the aftermath of car accidents, overdoses, sudden deaths.

There is nowhere to go, when this face of reality — so successfully buffered from normal consciousness — erupts to claim our awareness.  There is nowhere to go.  No anxiety, no worry, no revision of narratives or change in plans, that will turn events to a prior order or coherence.

These will, of course, rush in later: the “how did this happen,” “what must we change,” and “now what?”

But as I watch the fish, I experience a zen-like clarity that rinses the mind of its plaque-like constructs.  I let myself drift in this brief lull in which nothing is manageable, nothing is within reach of my will, nothing “makes sense.”  It just IS.  And because nothing makes sense, strangely, everything does.

The architect Frank Gehry was said to have remarked, “Life is chaotic, dangerous and surprising.”  His built his buildings to reflect this.  The Buddha said much the same thing.  So did Jesus, though he intuited the presence of a form-giving coherence that, in the days to come, we will, doubtless, look for signs of, in the progress of steps, sleep, simple balance.

For now, I find myself being invited by a strangely compassionate Spirit to just sink into this moment by the fish tank, in which I control nothing.  A sensation of oceanic calm, of comfort, fills my being.  It is corrective, healing, freeing.  I could be on my back in a warm swimming pool, as I sit in the low-lit, linoleum-lined waiting area, occasionally eyeing the large, overnight clerk behind the desk who is popping chips from a bag,  The day could be just beginning.  For just a moment, fear, regret, resentment, anger, the many plans and hopes and expectations in ruins, the many feelings that could mar the moment…are all held in miraculous abeyance.  Perhaps, I think, this is what it feels like to surrender.  Perhaps, this is a deep state of prayer.  For a moment, suspended in time and space, simply aware of the holiness of life itself, all is good.

There is no place to go, nothing to do.

The sun will come up, emails and phone calls of concern will begin to flood in.  Doctors and nurses and PT people, and equipment and rented beds and, and, and… But not yet.  For now, there is no narrative to recount, nothing to reason out, no causes and effects, no flashbacks.

To just stop.  To stop making waves, wants, reasons…

When we can do this, it all makes sense — in the only sense that matters.  This life in time, our frailty, our foolish over-reaching, our mistakes, our griefs, our aspirations, our loves.

It all just IS.  And in every moment, this possibility for being present to this truth.  I want to hold onto it.  There’s a beauty in this that I will return to time and again in the weeks and months ahead.

The clerk looks up.

“You can go in now.”