wrestling

I don't cry easily. I'm a little bit envious of people who do - the few times I've experienced a good cry it's been so cathartic, like an invisible weight evaporated as the tears dried.

The moments are embarrassingly too few for me when I find a lump in my throat even, or when my eyes begin to fill up with just the threat of overflowing.

One of my mentors cries while watching youtube videos of rescued puppies, and he doesn't even like dogs. He cried this morning at church.

That doesn't happen for me. But today tears streamed freely down my face.

I've been mulling over some difficult personal news for several months. It's the kind of news you can't really do anything about. You can't operationalize it. You can't solve it.  It's the very human feeling of only being the direct object of a sentence which is being spoken about you and not by you. I slip out of the driver's seat of my own life and wonder at how quickly that semantic switch happened.

When this difficulty was more theoretical than practical, when I first sensed it like a dark cloud on the horizon of an otherwise perfect, blue sky, my fears were shallow. They ran in the same circuit of silly fears we all harbor, that gnaw at us like vultures picking at a comically fat carcass. What of my "career"? What of my ambitions to be a ____ and do ____. What of my desire to be known and praised?

But now that the storm is close, I can feel the barometric pressure drop and the lump in my chest rise, I see the risk of what could be lost clearly, as if it's already gone. The loss is deeper. It cuts to the most essential things, like a knife slicing between bone and tendon. It spares no time or care for the thin veneer of things I thought mattered. Just hours earlier, these things had consumed the great majority of my imagination - the area under the curve of my imagination was dominated by my own selfish ambitions, and in the simplest terms, a desire to be known on my own terms, and nobody else's. To be heroic. The lowest common denominator had been exposed, and damn was it low. Even for me.

Now there is a very clear picture of the thing that may be lost. The will to cling to life as it is takes on a meaning that re-shapes life altogether. The things I cling to mean less than ever. The ones I cling to now are everything to me, I am reminded that my life has always been a wonderful gift I've been given and the beautiful connections that make life meaningful, the people that make it meaningful, that are now my world, and will be my world one day, those are the stakes.

I find myself shockingly aware of the loneliness of ambition. That I have sunk the wealth of my time, imagination, and effort into a singular and bottomless void: pride will consume indefinitely. But when I find myself giving myself to others, the borders of my being dissolve - I begin to feel the limits fade as who I am begins to incorporate the people I care for, and really care, not the silly kind of caring that is aimed at satisfying a sense of civic responsibility that exists to stroke the ego. But the deep kind of caring that comes from owning the loss and joy of others as if it is your own. That is what I am finally becoming conscious of, however stupidly, and slowly. That kind of ownership of each other doesn't require us to post on facebook and twitter or sign a petition - though we may. It means we can quietly hold the hand of someone we love and cry because the pain is so great it burdens the heart to breaking. It means we can look into the face of our love and see uninhibited faith and grace there, as we are known and given dignity we hardly believe we deserve.

I hope you don't hear sermonizing in these words, but that you find a vulnerable heart here, one which your own vulnerable heart beats with, in time, for the span of these words.

With this difficult, and seemingly intractable problem that refuses to settle and disappear, that refuses to back down its threat, I have found myself huddled around a single idea that motivates me to fight and hope and wrestle with God.

That simple thought is to hold on to the ones I love, to see their faces for years to come.

I never thought I'd be in a place where that kind of idea would come to motivate my life. But that's where I am. I find my small and cold heart impossibly expanding and stretching to love more, to care more deeply, to desire more fervently than I thought I could.

I've realized for myself that a career can trap you with false choices. You begin to whittle down your world until it courses in a very narrow artery that feeds only one organ, that demanding organ of ambition. And medicine is maybe the most demanding of these kinds of careers, because there is a silent pride that comes with giving it everything, among members of that inner sanctum, who sacrifice much for their field. It is a heavy tax we levy on each other for our own vainglory. Their sacrifice makes ours more meaningful.

It's an old message of perspective, and how it transforms life. There are sweet adages that people tend to invoke at these junctures, usually wishing you to be spared from this or that.

But I don't wish that for you.

I wish for you to have the hard thing. The painful thing. I wish for you to wrestle with an unknown and all powerful God, and to learn in that struggle what it means to cling to the one thing that matters. I wish for you to shed tears freely, as I hope to. To be freed from the small, futile and hungry desires.

This struggle relieves you of the daily anxieties, though you will still face them, they will seem smaller and more easily managed. This struggle will hopefully help you live life with an open hand, expecting nothing, giving much and reserving nothing, not even the space inside your heart. And you will find there is more room in that humble organ than you ever thought possible.