My first experience with debilitating arthritis came while I was still working as a technical writer for a software company in Connecticut. I’d finished a document, sent it to the distant printer, and stepped out of my cubicle to go retrieve it. Maybe two steps into the corridor, and WHAM! Excruciating pain, and my left knee buckled, unable to support weight. So there I stood, hanging onto the top of the cubicle corridor wall, wondering how to get back to a chair and how long it might be possible to seem casual out there with my white-knuckled fingers clamped over the top of someone else’s cube, unable to move.
An orthopedist later explained what had happened: “You hit a pothole in the cartilage.”
This is a metaphor with many uses, applicable also to distressing NDEs and their relatives. It’s certainly more helpful than the conventional judgments about deservingness or attraction. The cosmos is a violent place as well as tranquil, terrible darkness alongside glorious light. Neither dark nor light is the whole.
Why shouldn’t the spiritual road have potholes? They’re not forever.
Potholes can be life transforming experiences.
Pothole #1
For five years I had a love relationship with a woman much younger than I was. Progressively, it fell apart. In her confusion, she gave me a very hard time, I would snap and yell “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME AND FIND SOMEONE YOUR OWN AGE!
The hardest thing to do is to tell someone you love completely to get away from you for their own good. I didn’t handle it very well. For the next three years I was emotionally devestated.
Lesson learned, You have to have humility in love. Ego has no place there. Also, you can only love as deeply as you render yourself completely vulnerable to being hurt. True love is defenseless. It takes great courage to truly……………..Love.
Pothole #2
My present wife Janet had two kids when I married her. My stepson was real trouble. Lying, cheating, stealing, and verbally abusive. He was a big teen ager. I got an order of protection, and he violated it. I told my wife as we argued “OK you go live with him”!.
They moved out to another house down the street. They lived there till’ he was 18, and could live on his own.
There was a large desk of hers she left in our bedroom. I said “I’m gonna’ get this damn thing out of my house. I brought it down the stairs by myself. It got away from me, threw me over the stair railing, and I landed flat on my back six feet down in the hall. I couldn’t move for three months.
Lesson learned. Any decesion made in anger is always the wrong decision.
Dave, thanks for such strong examples of potholes. The biggest hurts (and sometimes the biggest embarrassments) are typically the biggest avenues to learning important stuff.