Broken Open
There is a commercial for Tylenol that encourages the viewer to take medication for pain so they can get back to normal life. They say, “Whatever your ‘normal’ is.” It’s meant to acknowledge that we are all different. And, that normal is the preferred state.
But what if our pain is emotional? What if Tylenol is not able to fix it? People still want to get back to normal. Unfortunately, when it comes to some situations (especially grief and loss), normal has changed. Forever.
What Elizabeth Lesser offers is an opportunity – to examine the pain and grow through difficult times.
Life challenges can offer a chance to reflect and make decisions about the future. We may reevaluate what is important. It is not always the case, however. Sometimes people feel a double loss. It’s not just the loss of a person, or a job, or a house. It can also be the loss of self. Normal disappears.
Why I loved this book
Lesser is a master story teller. She is honest about her own struggle and what she has learned. Where it has led her. She encourages us to follow the path of deep self-discovery, quoting Chogyam Trungpa, along a path that is messy. The first step is abandoning the notion of how life is “supposed to be” and leaning into how it actually is.
I was hooked on the first line of this book – “How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.” Isn’t that the truth? Often times we say we want change. But we get stuck in our ways, and the status quo is the easiest path. It can also feel stable in a busy world.
By far, my favourite part is her story about comedian Wavy Gravy and his analogy of Bozos on the Bus. He contends that we are all a big jumbled mess. Bozos. Traveling together on our earth path. Yet, we often think we are the only one.
This idea was a game-changer for me!
“Every single person on this bus called Earth hurts; it’s when we have shame about our failing that hurt turns into suffering. In our shame, we feel outcast, as if there is another bus somewhere, rolling along a smooth road. Its passengers are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that don’t bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things, or goofy things like forget where they parked their car, lose their wallet, or say something totally inappropriate. We long to be on that bus with the other normal people.”
Wavy Gravy, and Lesser, open us up to the idea that we all struggle. That we are not alone. And encourage us to celebrate that fact.
“If we’re all bozos, then for God’s sake, we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos.”
What a refreshing idea!
What I learned
Change is inevitable. It is up to us to decide what it will look like. Who we will be.
By far the part of this book I learned the most from was her chapters on birth/death. Lesser was a mid-wife. She delivered plenty of babies. But she also sat with people as they died. Two sides of the same coin. Except the latter can bring us to our knees in fear. In her workshops, Lesser breaks death down in three easy steps:
Death is not something that happens at the end of our lives. Rather, we lose things everyday throughout our life.
Grief is not something to be rushed. It is proof that we have loved. It needs time to properly honour that love.
Death is the beginning of an adventure. (I guess this one assumes there is something that happens after death. And, that it is going to be something interesting.)
She goes on to talk more about grief. I read this book before I chose to become a grief therapist and believe her take on grieving as an art has informed my practice. She believes, “It takes attention and patience and courage.”
Grieving is something we have all done. Or, that we will all do at some point in our life. Yet, we are not taught how. We are taught how to acquire things throughout our life, but not how to lose them. And when we do experience grief, there is a tendency to want to push through it. It’s messy and uncomfortable. We don’t like to sit in our pain.
We prefer to medicate. Get back to normal.
Final thoughts
Life is unpredictable and uncertain. Our goal is to learn how to relax into it. Surrender to the mystery. Lesser believes there is a peace that comes with that kind of acceptance. At the same time, she includes how to meditate and pray because, after all, “difficult journeys are best taken in a sturdy vehicle”.
Lesser writes a great deal about her own life in this book – her children, marriages, friends. Reading it struck me with the notion that we all write our stories in these vignettes. Our lives are a series of short stories. Peak moments.
What would your stories be? As the poet Mary Oliver asks us: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I think that is the best question.
Favourite Quotes
On adulting: “In the same way you that you cannot drive a car without passing a road test, you wouldn’t be able to become an adult without witnessing the miracles of birth and death.”
On healing: “From the beginning I tried to accept that where I was, was exactly where I was meant to be. This freed my mind up to pursue my healing.”
On transformation: “I was in the middle again, in the darkness, in the woods. The straight way was lost; there was no going back; the new way would reveal itself when it was good and ready, when I had learned some new lessons, when I had surrendered to change and transformation.”