Every morning, when we wake up, we have 24 brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these 24 hours will bring peace, joy, & happiness to ourselves & others.– –Thich Nhat Hanh
“How different my life is now,” I thought as I sat in silence this morning, taking pleasure in the stillness, the chatter and chirp of the birds, my terrier’s head resting on my thigh. I remembered a time when the morning was never still, when I rarely did anything but jump in the shower, dress quickly, stop at Peet’s Coffee and grab a latte to drink as I joined the bumper to bumper traffic in the morning rush to the office. My outer life seemed prosperous, successful, but stressed. My inner life was all but neglected, parched and dying of thirst—I rarely had time to “feed” it as I ran from meeting to meeting. By night, exhausted, I re-entered the world of family, wife and mother, occasional writer, the day’s demands already growing distant. Rarely did my various worlds intersect.
We humans are complex. Unlike other members of the animal kingdom, our lives involve much more than basic need. We have the unique capacity to live more than one life at a time, inhabiting several different “worlds.” As Patrice Vecchione describes in her book, Writing and the Spiritual Life, we live our lives on many planes. Although we may not always be aware of it, our inner and outer lives interact; affecting and informing each other as we move between the different worlds we inhabit each day. In the busy lives we often lead, it’s easy to move through one world and another, and ignore the needs of our inner lives. Sooner or later, it catches up with us.
Once I moved between my different worlds—professional, volunteer, friend, mother, student—as if they were separate, without giving much thought to the way in which those different aspects of my life, the roles I played each day, interacted with one another. I was on a virtual elevator, constantly in motion, and racing between floors. Push a button, the elevator moved up or down, stopped and the doors opened: “Second floor, family life.” “Third floor, workplace.” “Fourth floor, Business lunches and dinners. Fifth floor: Volunteer committee meetings.” There were many floors to stop at every day: my social life, even the classroom, where, for a few hours each week, I left my family at home, changed from the professional business suit to comfortable slacks and shirts, and pushed the elevator button, and got off at graduate school. Once in a great while, the elevator would stop at my spiritual world, but for many years, those stops were brief and far apart. In my very busy and important life, I moved between those worlds quickly, and most times, one floor seemed distinct and separate from another.
“I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day,” poet Joy Harjo wrote in her essay, “Ordinary Spirit.” Harjo was referring to her mixed race, in part, and the struggle to “unify” her different worlds. That struggle to unify my different worlds, my inner life with my outer one, was something I truly didn’t address, at least not with any sustained effort, until I heard my doctor say “cancer,” and then again, as I was gradually slipping back into an “old” way of being, when an unexpected episode of heart failure left me unconscious on the sidewalk, my dog’s still leash in my hand.
I paid attention. I took steps to change my life, to blur the boundaries between my inner and outer life, and the different worlds I inhabited each day. As Harjo expressed in her essay, I realized that it was “only an illusion that any of the worlds we inhabit are separate.” This “new” world, the one where I had suddenly become a heart patient, living with the knowledge of how abruptly one’s life can end, indeed, how capricious life can be, affected all other “worlds” of my life in deep and significant ways.
Any predictability and routine in my life was scattered to the wind. Where I once felt I had some control over the course of my life, I now felt as if I was in free fall, an unwilling passenger in a wayward elevator, moving randomly between floors. Fear and depression colored my days, despite my cardiologist’s reassurances. I sported a bump just to the left of my breastbone, a defibrillator underneath the skin, a constant reminder of what had happened and the need to change my life. Unbeknownst to anyone, I began praying each night, silent pleas to some higher power, struggling to find hope where fear resided. It took time. It took change. I was forced me to think differently about my life and what, above all else, really mattered to me.
It’s an experience I find similar to what I witness among the men and women in my expressive writing groups. Cancer. The crises it ignites in everyone’s life who reels from the words they never wanted to hear: “You have cancer.” Every part of their lives is affected. They move, numbly at first, through second opinions, treatment decisions, treatment regimens, appointments, and always, lurking in the background, that demon fear. All that they are—who they have thought themselves to be–mind, body, and spirit–is thrust into upheaval. They no longer inhabit the different worlds in their lives with the same assumptions they once did. What was once familiar now seems strange, and when the elevator finally ceases its terrifying ride, the doors open, and they look out to a new and often confusing world. Their challenge, as mine was, is to try to make sense of it, to find the path to wholeness and healing. For each of us, the routes are different: faith, meditation, yoga, writing, music, art—it hardly matters. All of us are seekers, working hard to inhabit this new world and integrate it into all the other worlds that have shaped us into the people we are.
I look back to that self of more than a decade ago, the one for whom stress was a steady diet, caught up in the world of a career I didn’t even like and yet, striving to climb the ladder of success like so many of my colleagues. I pushed the knowledge of my unhappiness aside, until one day, as a corporate executive with a spacious office overlooking Park Avenue in New York, I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window as I walked from my apartment to my office. Grim-faced, briefcase held tight against my body, shoulders hunched forward, stress oozed from every pore. “Who have I become?” I remembered thinking. It was a time when the different worlds I inhabited were as separate from one another as they could be. But change wasn’t immediate. I fumbled on for a few more years until cancer and heart failure delivered the whack on the side of the head I needed. I stepped off the elevator and choose which worlds I truly wanted to inhabit in my life—but more, how I could make my life harmonious and whole.
Her first steps, though cautious, began immediately to reinforce her faith in greater possibilities. –George MacDonald
What about you? What different worlds do you inhabit each day? What are the many roles you play in your life? How were your “worlds” affected by cancer, loss or another unexpected hardship? What changed? Write about how you’ve moved in and out of different worlds or the many roles you have played before and after your life was altered in unexpected ways.