Life's little lessons

I'm not sure I believe that life sends you lessons on purpose. But I do believe that we can learn lessons from what life sends us. Recently, life sent me a message that I have to slow the hell down. That's a hard lesson for this driven, uber-ambitious gal who used to work 14 hours a day just because, whose accountant told her just this year that there was no point in worrying about being independently wealthy because all I'd do with my spare time is work anyway (easy for him to say: he's an accountant).

Back in the day, the 14-hour-plus workdays, I might have overdone it. In fact, at one point, I overdid it to the edge of severe illness, coming down with a lingering and debilitating case of mono that hit me like a jungle fever and refused to let go for two months. I'd just come off teaching a class at Berkeley while working full-time as a postdoc at UCSF while also working half time writing and editing while also teaching an online genetics class for Berkeley while participating in a teaching fellowship program at SFSU while parenting two children and wifing one man and becoming transiently pregnant.

Then followed the mono and a miscarriage. I thought the episode, as dragging and depressing and horrific as it all was, had ended. But the presumptive Epstein-Barr virus had different ideas.

Within nine months, my thyroid had gone irrevocably insane, hyperactive and huge, requiring its entire removal. Within another year, I had other, ahem, things that had to be removed from Me. And then, exactly two years after Epstein-Barr felled me, my foot fired up with what has now been diagnosed as "myelopathy possibly secondary to multiple sclerosis."

In the ensuing months, I lost my ability to work past about 8 pm. I lost my energy. I learned that I had to work when I could because when I couldn't...I really really couldn't. I dropped some of the projects I was doing. I learned to try to do things the easy way when reasonable, rather than always taking the hard way. Life delivered me Epstein-Barr and a demyelinating disease, and I had a few lessons to learn.

I had to slow down.

So I did. And I looked around. Did you know that there are books to read out there that don't have to do with work? TV shows that are pretty decent that you can watch, sometimes back-to-back on DVR? Children who want to play chess or read with you or just snuggle in the quiet dark after bedtime? Probably you knew that. But it was a lesson I had to learn--not just intellectually understand but really learn and learn to appreciate--and life delivered it to me in the form of a virus and some genetic susceptibility. I did these things before--read, snuggled, watched TV, played chess--but always with half or more of my mind somewhere else and usually with a laptop in front of me. Now that I'm slow, I put my entire mind into it, which has opened up some interior space and made room for a little concept called "appreciation."

And now, I've slowed waaaay the hell down. I don't teach anymore...at the end of a modest day of teaching, I'd practically be in a physical coma, melted into the couch, barely able to move a limb. I have only jobs I take on, to work on, at home. I manage my time, even though really, time manages me. I've already figured out after one day of summer that we're going to have an on-off schedule: one day "on" for busy outside activities, and one day "off" so Mama can recuperate.

So even though I don't really think that some amorphous entity called Life or Fate writes out curricula with learning objectives for each of us, I do believe that those of us who are alert to learnable moments have much to learn from life's little deliverables. My lesson was probably obvious to anyone who knew me, but I needed something to force on the brakes that I refused to use on my own.

Slow. Down. Unless you're a turtle, this likely is a good lesson for any of us.