The Final Lynching

I've sat at breakfast with a number of men who were approaching their seventieth birthday and listened to their observations, and then afterward when, inch by inch they edged on past it. Their general opinion was pretty much amazement that they had lived that long without suffering anymore than they did, no matter how much they had suffered.

I was impressed by this one guy Mike, who fell from a step ladder on to the driveway separating he and his neighbor's house. He had been out trimming his shrubbery, and the wife of the neighbor came out and asked him to lop a particular branch that hung low over their mutual driveway. He said he was happy to do it, but when he fell from the ladder, he broke his leg high up on his thigh.

The doctors put a stainless steel pin in the break and then supported it with a stainless steel plate that bolted together. I don't remember a morning for ten years that he didn't walk into the cafe trying to not limp, and then after he sat down in the booth, and had his coffee in front of him, would reach for the pain-killer of the month in his shirt pocket.

He talked about the incident that initiated his suffering. He talked about how he felt each individual stainless steel bolt that held the plates together. He rattled on for hours (accumulatively over the years) about how distinctly he could feel the edges of the stainless steel plate grabbing at the thigh muscles as he walked. He was reluctantly bitter about how much pain he had to endure because of ceding to a reasonable request from a neighbor. He suffered because he tried to do right.

Then, one day his doctor upped and told him that medical technology had advanced to the point where it was practical and feasible to get a hip-replacement in which the lower shaft of the implement would reach down past where the stainless steel plates and bolts were in his upper thigh, and take the infernal instrument of torture outta his body.

Like all old people who show up for breakfast at these cafes, these universal hang-outs all over the world (to show their friends they ain't dead yet), he returned from "taking his operation" as soon as possible, and he stated that his future looked a lot brighter. The wicked witch of the west was dead.

There was a setback. the artificial hip came out of it's socket and jammed it's way up into his lower abdomen, but they replaced the hip with a new model, and soon he was walking around like a rooster strutting his stuff. Then, he had a major heart attack, and eventually, we talked that all out too. Rather, he talked all that out, I listened.

Some people I seem to go out of my way to hear both sides of their story. I never imagined I'd do something like that, but I listened to two men tell what happened for over ten years each. In the end, neither one of them liked me very much. The other side of the story was not easy on them for me to conjure.

This passive side of me just seems so strange in comparison to the way I usually carry on. It's always been there. I just never noticed it so much until I was older. When I think about it, I spend a lot of time listening to other people tell me what's wot about themselves. Part of it is that I like to fish for this information from them. What they hear themselves telling me seems much more shocking than anything I might say to them without the pro-vocation of stimulating them to speak up.

We both know they wouldn't do it if I didn't ask the right questions. Using the I Ching as an oracle for over thirty years taught me how to do that, but it actually did take a lot of time to acquire some mastery in this arena, but it's one of the best agendas I've ever stuck to. What I didn't understand when I was younger was that this was my calling, my vocation.

"To have vocation means in the original sense to be addressed by a voice ... whereupon they are at once differentiated from the others and feel themselves confronted by a problem that the others do not know about... - C.G. Jung

http://koti.mbnet.fi/amoira/jungvoc1.htm

This "original sense" of the term vocation strikes home with me. Maybe when I was younger I didn't understand that the voice that called me is external. Actually, the other's voice rather than some internal voice that tells me when to stop using the I Ching or to stop eating bananas.

It's true. Those two commands was the only demands my inner voice has made of me that I consciously remember. "Stop doing the I Ching!", and "Stop eating bananas!". I love bananas. Who doesn't? But, despite that, I've never knowingly eaten a banana since I was told to stop. I wonder if that voice will tell me, "Stop breathing forever!" when the jig is up?