Subtle art of saving ourselves_2.1
Fools guide to saving the world, Part 2
There’s a moment there. A brief millisecond, just before you know blood is going to flow. Every time it’s happened to me I’ve been surprised at what was nestled in there amidst all that panic. Joy. A macabre fascination, or anticipation, of what was just around the corner.
Once I was hiking a trail. There were ten of us, all of a similar type. That weird kind that you can lure out into the wild with the promise of backpacks and some food in tins eaten hunched over a fire. The kind who also relished a challenge, almost seem to get off on it, subtly comparing the size of each other dicks through a series of escalating chest-beating contests.
This trail was a tough one. Not insane, not by Bare Grills standards, but enough to make your knees sore and push you into a place of regret. Day one I did what some foolish young men are inclined to do; lead, showed off, charged. Day two, around mid-morning, I looked down and my knee was sitting just to the right of where it was supposed to be and I was tumbling in slow motion to the ground.
There was no pain then, not yet anyway. Just a weird curiosity, the natural disgust with seeing a body part in the wrong place and the obvious questions of how and why. Pain followed shortly though when I hit the soft forest floor and tried to straighten my leg. It shot up through my nose like Wasabi and into my brain and bounced around in there like a canon ball and eventually found its way out of my mouth.
My friends knew that kind of shout, they’d been around enough. Too raw to be exciting and so they found me at a run a few seconds later in a pile. My knee cap was dislocated. The strong tendons that were meant to hold it in place were now yanking the knee bone slowly back against the leg bone beneath. Crushing it. One agonisingly slow second at a time.
The x-ray would later reveal that those tendons did their work thoroughly, the doc said it looked like I had been hit by a ten-pound hammer. The area beneath my dislodged knee cap was smashed and dented. But that would be several hours later and only after I was finally able to be carried out of a fire escape by willing rangers and thankfully subdued by a very large dose of morphine.
Surprisingly though, right then, in those initial moments went I was propped up against the tree I felt no pain. Like none. Not for a good fifteen minutes. Even though my bones were breaking and tendons tearing I felt utter relief thanks to the power of adrenaline. Sitting on the floor, in that pile of my own mess and failure, I could simply revel in the attention of my peers, the coming story, the forgone glory of making it out alive.
When the boys left, along with my first wife, I took to running. Same sort of idea. Adrenaline to numb the pain. We had moved to a farm to escape the madness of our own desperate marriage. And to have a garden, that was something we never had before and thought would make us all better.
But big properties need protection and pretty soon we had a black blur chasing people along our fence line. Her name was Lunar. But Lunar was lonely so Jack-Jack followed soon after but he could never quite compete with her pedigree. Lunar was a Doberman. Smart. Loyal. Kind. She loved me as only a good dog can, without fail.
One day when running through the sugar cane fields my knee did it’s old trick except for this time I was utterly alone. No one but me and those two, helpless hounds who were very looking very anxious indeed when I hit the ground. I screamed out in Zulu for help but it would be hours before anyone came. When they finally did they couldn’t get close to me because of the dogs. They had backed their bums into my chest and wouldn’t let anyone near. Same story as the first time. Fifteen-minute of painlessness that I didn’t take for granted this time, and then the agony set in. After that I remember only not being able to contain the screams on the hour-long trip down a very bumpy dirt road.
Lunar died, a few months later. While I was still on crutches. I arrived home one night to a very and scary place, the farm was in the middle of no-where which in South Africa is not a brilliant idea and she was lying on the driveway, her back was facing away from me in a menacing way. I knew instantly she was dead. Her lovely, black body was painted a dusty yellow thanks to my headlights and I could see that already she was stiffening up from her passing.
It was a thing for snakes that killed her. She had saved me several times before. A few weeks earlier she had managed to bite a two or three meter black mamba in the stomach as it passed through the garden. It got stuck on the fence trying to escape her ferocious love. That black and white serpentine body is burner into my brain. It went up the full length of the security fence and down half the other side. Dead.
Later than night lunar died I found a Mozambique Spitting Cobra of a reasonable size, its body bit cleanly in two. The tail looked like a worm and so I picked it up and the blood flowed liberally onto my shoes. It didn’t take me long to find the head right by the front door. They’re one of the most deadly snakes there is, on my crutches it is likely I would have fallen prey to it’s deadly poison if it hadn’t been for Lunar’s love.
The next day I buried Lunar at the base of the garden. It was a quiet affair. Just me. The wind in the trees. The summer air. We, my ex-wife and I, thought that if we changed our environment it might help our marriage. Somehow that never seems to be the smartest solution to big problems. A bit like dealing with sick fruit when the problem is in actually in the roots. Clearly not so smart. So without my family, in Durban, a city a thousand kilometers away from a group of people who really knew my name and insides because it had taken fifteen years to do so because I can be prickly, I was all alone. Utterly alone and in terrible pain.
But life and pain are full of mercies as we’ve seen. You would think that losing my family would kill me. But it didn’t. You would think that hobbling through airports on crutches to see my two sons would kill me. But it didn’t. You would think that living without friends, on a forsaken farm, with no one I knew and months of little contact other than a few kind words said at work and some brief visits to my parents (the briefness was my own issue) would kill me, but that didn’t either. Time passed, the pain went from novel, to excruciating, to uncomfortable and then all the way back to normal. Just like my knee.
Fruit trees might be the easiest way to see why. Cut each year at the base of a branch the glorious sweet juice flows like a river eight months later, down from our lips and smiling faces and sometimes, and if we are lucky, most lavishly onto our hands. It’s strange to think that left uncut that same fruit shrivels, shrinks, and becomes less. Stranger still, the most biodiverse places on the planet require fire, or elephants, or destruction to keep them looking lovely and full of life. Who would have thought? Without destructive forces, those places dwindle?? They too become stale, full of weeds and rank; walking around like us with a somber, grey expression, a shadow of their former selves.
Maybe then our fascination with pain (think about the shows we watch or books we read) is because deep down, in the back of our monkey brains, we know that it’s good for us in some strange way. That is if we choose to submit to it, enjoy it, welcome it, learn from it and actually allow it to make us much, much better as it should.
So if there is a ‘subtle art of saving ourselves’ that isn’t so nauseating because of how trendy it could sound it probably would be found in between all those mysterious layers right there. The ones between pain, submission and how strong we really are. A gentle knowing that growth is not a neat, long linear curve we are sold thanks to short stories but rather a series of hideous oscillations. The bounces of a heart monitor up and down tearing ferociously between life and death.
I suppose the point then comes back to love. It always somehow does. These days we think loving ourselves is the way we look, a trip to the spar, a new shiny pair of kicks or studs. But maybe love is having enough grace for ourselves and the mess that life can sometimes just be? Not getting frustrated when things don’t come right quick enough; or when our story sags; or when we’re stuck in the same old rut (as long we are intentionally heading up). It’s so easy to say. I know that. But saving ourselves maybe starts with letting go the expectation that we need to be just perfect and pain free?
