Sick and Selfish

On a sleepless night a few weeks ago, I watched the movie “The Man in the Moon,” to distract myself from the pain I was feeling. While I laid there, brooding in my pain, the protagonist’s father said something to her that moved me:

“If you get so involved in your own pain that you can’t see when someone else is hurting, you might as well crawl into a hole and pull the dirt right in on top of you ‘cause you’ll never be any good to yourself… or to anyone else.” – Matthew

WOW. If that isn’t a sign from the universe, then I don’t know what is, I thought to myself. Guilt set in; years of it. I have been so involved in my own sickness for so long that I have been no good to anyone. It was right then and there that I decided to begin making a sincere and conscious effort to see, acknowledge, and act on the pain carried by others, rather than just my own. Now the question was, how? How do I change a major character flaw that has been deeply ingrained in my being from years of pain and sickness? I thought on it the remainder of the movie, without coming to any kind of resolution or plan of action.

It was after the movie, while listening to music, that the answer found me. I shuffled the music on my iTunes library and the first song that came on was by none other than Nirvana. Nirvana! That’s it! I suddenly remembered a passage I read from a Buddhist inspired book, How to Be Sick, that spoke of this stereological goal within Indian religions; I grew to understand Nirvana as the state of being freed from suffering, to have a peace of mind, cultivated by ‘sadhana,’ a spiritual practice where bondage becomes liberation.

Sadhana is quite literally “a means of accomplishing something” (A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary) It is something which you want to do, have to do, and which is being done by you. Living beyond my pain and discomfort would be by sadhana, my self-enrichment, my masterpiece.

It is my prayer that I can be and continue to be sick and selfless.

Here goes.