It’s been a minute since I’ve penned a little note to you (and me). The quiet was an unintended consequence of the busy-ness of life– of caregiving, showing up, being present, and healing.
If you were to ask me how life is, I would say, “All good. Nothing’s changed (and let’s knock on all the wood that that is true).” And then, the other day, I realized that while this year has maybe felt uneventful, I’ve actually been navigating a major event in my personal life that will impact the rest of my days.
As some of you may remember, last December, I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and as I got out of bed, I realized that the room was spinning out of control My legs gave out and I crashed into our dresser. After laying still for a couple hours, the spinning never lessened so I went to the emergency room at 5 AM where they checked me for a stroke or aneurysm and then treated me for vertigo. I went home that night exhausted but no longer spinning. A few days later, the spinning returned and I was back in the Emergency Room. This time when I went home, there was a roar of noise in my right ear. As December turned to January, the vertigo did not return but the tinnitus in my ear never stopped. A hearing test revealed that the virus* that caused my vertigo fried my auditory nerve, leaving me severely deaf in my right ear (*an MRI confirmed that the hearing loss and vertigo were not the work of a brain tumor).
Pretty immediately, I asked for a hearing aid. My doctor was both relieved and shocked as most adults who have hearing loss do not elect to use a hearing aid. And to be fair, the hearing aid didn’t give me back my hearing in the traditional way. If you are sitting on my right side and try to talk to me and there is any other noise going on, I cannot hear a word that you are saying. Even with the hearing aid, I cannot circumlocate sound (I tend to spin around in ALL the directions if someone calls out my name as I have no idea where the sound is coming from). But the hearing aid quiets the tinnitus (which is a sweet relief because having tinnitus is like having your brain constantly running an auditory marathon so it is profoundly mentally taxing and exhausting), and it gives me a more broad auditory experience of the world.
So I imagine that I have been more quiet this year because I am trying so hard to hear– hear the world and her people and all of their stories and to hear the quiet whisper from my soul of what I need to sustain myself in this new reality of my life.
But, then on Friday, I was participating in a yoga class that was part of a retreat on self-care that I was facilitating and the teacher said something that struck me in such a way that I wanted to share it.
We were doing tree pose– a standing posture that invites you to stand on one leg and then place the foot of the other leg somewhere on your plant leg. You might put it on the side of your calf or up above your knee, forming a little triangle off of your plant leg. Balance poses have always been hard for me but throw in my new aural challenges and, well, they are pretty close to impossible. So I would hold my tree pose for a few seconds and fall out of it and then begin again- over and over again.
And then the teacher encouraged us to keep our minds blank, to just breathe through the moments, and will our focus back to our breathing and the sensation in our body.
“A single thought can knock you over,” she explained.
A. SINGLE.THOUGHT.CAN.KNOCK.YOU.OVER.
And while in that moment, she may have been referring to our yoga practice, she was also referring to so much more– to how we can become consumed with a fear or worry or new thing in such a way that it derails us. To how we can work things over so much in our mind that it stops us from ever working them out in our lives.
Since Friday, I have been thinking about the power of our thoughts. How they can derail or inspire us. How they can lead us to victory or defeat. This morning, as I snapped my hearing aid battery shut and tucked it into my ear, I thought, “May I let what I hear in the world guide me and my thoughts inspire rather than derail me.” It was the tiniest of manifestos for this day but I offer it to you, too, in case it is also just what you needed to hear.
