life becomes clear
There is something about flying in a plane that helps me to focus. I get some of the best work and reading done during travel. On my trip to Minneapolis and back last week, I read up on the news, research papers, and did uninterrupted thinking at thirty-thousand feet up in the air. But sometimes the loud hum of the airplane ride becomes a shield between my thoughts and the outside world, noises and conversations feel distant on the other side of that border, and I am trapped within my own existence. During the flight to Minneapolis, I let my mind wander inward, and I was confronted with unresolved dissonance that has been lingering now for a while.
Thinking about all the things that happened in the last 1-year period, there has been a message of life and death that has been staring at me in the face. It all began with a breast cancer scare in August of 2021, and while it turned out to be high-risk benign, it still meant that I had to spend about 5 days with the possibility that I was a cancer patient. I was in Dallas with my brother’s family who had just welcomed a tiny boy. I had flown to Dallas with this weight of cancer on my shoulders, and wondered while holding this new life whether or not I would see him grow up and fulfill the potential that was brewing inside his little body and mind. I was so thankful that it was not malignant, but the lumpectomy that was done out of precaution and the post surgical complications gave me a glimpse into the middle-aged life that I was now living.
After the turn of the year, there has been Jeff’s abdominal aortic aneurysm surgery, Maris’s cancer diagnosis, losing Jeff’s mother (and the sorrow of not being able to see her to say good bye due to Jeff’s inability to travel), and then of course, eventually saying good bye to Maris. It has been a year of existential emergencies, and we were so busy handling all of it that I do not believe we have processed them. It will take me a long time to understand and articulate the impact of these events holistically, but perhaps the first of these have come to me during the plane ride to Minneapolis.
The dissonance that has been ringing in my ears pertains to innocence. The loss of Maris has been a loss of my innocence, perhaps the type of growing up that most people learn much earlier in life. A piece of me departed to the Rainbow Bridge with Maris, and that change feels permanent to me. But then Jeff’s second chance at life through a series of miracles was an event that helped to reclaim a vintage of innocence that feels familiar to me from a distant past. Holding him in my arms everyday after an event that statistically would have taken him away from me breeds a sense of gratitude that is too grand for words… because this life is not ours to plan. Anything can happen at any moment, and if you are a religious person like me, it is really in God’s control. And when you can acknowledge that you’re not actually driving the overarching trajectory of your life, you can let go. And letting go means you can live fearlessly. And that’s where innocence comes in… the fearlessness of youth. It is the excitement that lies ahead for what God may have in store, it is the courage to do/say the right thing for its own moral sake, and the optimism that comes with knowing that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28, NIV).
Innocence lost, innocence regained… the dissonance has not yet quite resolved and I still feel that I need to explore these topics a bit more. What did I really lose? and how have I been restored? At this time, I feel a bit like a Picasso painting where I’ve been stitched back together but not in my previous form. Maybe I love Picasso so much because he paints how most of us feel – that life is a patchwork of events that alter us as time passes, and that the dissonance we live with can linger and resonate for a while. But my goal is to resolve that tension so that something good can come out of it. I do not intend to be a Picasso painting forever.
The Little One 