You can really learn a lot from a one year old. My daughter has a cold — runny nose, juicy sneezes, etc. Occasionally she will get a little fussy or cranky but for the most part she acts the same as when she is not sick. I can still make her smile and laugh. She still listens to stories. She still crawls around on the floor and plays.
Unlike me! Most of us shut down when we are sick or have headaches or other pains. We don’t smile or laugh. We want to be left alone. We want the world to know that we are miserable. And if we do allow any interaction it must be perfectly clear that we are allowing it at great sacrifice to ourselves.
Stephen Levine, in Who Dies? talks about sickness as a dress rehearsal for death. From the chapter titled “Be Also Ready” (emphasis mine):
Sphere: Related Content
In a way, it seems strange that we are so unprepared for death, considering how many opportunities we have to open to what is unexpected or even disagreeable. Each time we don’t feel well, each time we have the fly or a kidney stone or a pain and stiffness in the back, we have the opportunity to see that sooner or later some pain or illness is going to arise that won’t diminish but will increase until it displaces us from the body. We can use each such situation as an extraordinary opportunity to practice the death chant, to practice Gandhi’s closeness with God. We are reminded again and again of the process we are. Continually opportunities arise to practice letting go of this solidness, to tune to the ongoing process, to sense the spaciousness in which it’s all unfolding.
Why wait until the pain is too great to focus the mind? Why not use each moment of sickness, each flu, each cold, each slight injury, as a reminder to let go, to open to the intenisty arising?
When pain or sickness arises I see there is the option to open to it, not holding or pushing it away, not blocking it, not intensifying it. When I open to it as a teacher it no longer reinforces identification with “the sufferer,” “the victim of circumstances,” It’s just what is. And as I try to open to it, I see how it is a perfect preparation for whatever might come next, a deeper letting go. It shows me how I hold to any expectation that life has to be any way at all. Being sick or accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer becomes preparation for the impossible, for dying, for living in the next unknown moment of life.
