A friend of mine caught the flue recently and when the worst symptoms were gone, he didn’t feel well for another several weeks. He was terribly impatient. I would have been, too, and each day he woke up, he was bummed out that he still didn’t feel strong and healthy.
He is not alone. We human beings are impatient about a lot of things. But however we feel, things take as long as they take. Like healing. It has its own time line. We can fight it if we want to and spend precious time being angry and feeling like a victim or we can
surrender and be kind to ourselves. I turn to my cat as a role model for patience.
Years ago, I was relaxing in bed, watching TV and knitting a sweater, when I heard a loud bang. It sounded like a statue or a huge book case had fallen down the stairs. When I got up to see what had happened, my cat, Star was lying in the hallway in front of my room. She let out a terrible moan. I’ll never forget the sound of it. I sat down next to her and looked up. She had been sitting on a perch at the top of the stairs and she’d fallen fifteen feet. Her balance is impeccable like most cats, but she must have been asleep, turned over, fell off her perch and landed hard on her right
back leg.
I was devastated as I watched herb try to stand up. She couldn’t get up and I took her in my arms and palpated her legs. I wondered if she had broken something but she didn’t flinch when I touched her. She was horribly freaked out, so was I, so I put her to bed with me. She fell asleep immediately but when we got up in the morning, she still couldn’t stand up. I called a vet who couldn’t see her due to Covid so we ended up at a pet emergency hospital. They wouldn’t allow me to go into the back of the hospital to soothe her. She was in her carrier and I sat there in my mask for seven hours. A neighbor had driven me to the vet and he stayed with me the whole time. An entire day and a thousand dollars later, they brought Star to me. Her x-rays hadn’t shown any breaks or contusions and the ultrasound didn’t show any fluid build up. That was a blessing, just like my neighbor was.
When we got back home, I put Star on my bed and I watched her heal. She was relaxed and she surrendered to what had happened. She stayed on my bed for two weeks. I fed her there, I carried her to her litter box and I stroked her fur while she slept. She had no anxiety or guilt or impatience. Those things have nothing to do with cats. Sleeping has everything to do with them.
It’s a miraculous thing that we are built to heal, but unlike animals, human beings fight it and become impatient. “This is taking too long,” we think. But when it comes to healing, there is no such thing as “too long.” There is only “the amount of time that it takes.” We can eat healthy, sleep and exercise but healing still takes as long as it
takes.
After Star spent several weeks resting on my bed, one day when I was upstairs getting something to eat, she appeared at the top of the stairs. She limped for a while. I was afraid the limp wouldn’t go away but after a few days, she was walking normally again. I marveled at how she had allowed herself the time that she needed and when she
was stronger, she was through.
Granted, we have many things to do to keep our lives together and our pets don’t, but we could do a lot more self-soothing and a lot less blaming and wishing something else was going on. Cats
don’t don’t beat themselves up. They soothe themselves, they live in the now, they sleep when they’re tired and they eat when they’re hungry. They’re graced with the inability to think into the future or the past, to tell themselves stories with bad endings, and to wish something else was going on. They just relax and heal.
Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion. The following words from Stephen Levine are at the
heart of this blog. “To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear. When we’re in pain, it’s not a good idea to beat ourselves up and cause ourselves more pain. If you had a broken leg, you wouldn’t keep kicking it. So why would thrash yourself when we get sick or wounded. We are all broken and wounded in our individual ways. That’s the nature of being alive.
Being wounded asks for our kindness. The more I stroke my cat, the more she relaxes and the better she seems to feel. I’d like to have the same compassion for myself instead of being anxious and frightened and wondering, “Are we there yet?” Getting better is a
natural process but it doesn’t happen in a straight line. It has dips and peaks and our job is to do the right thing to heal and be patient. When we know what to do and we refuse to do it, we’re hurting ourselves all over again and extending the time it’ll take to feel better.
I knew a woman who went dancing on high heels a few weeks after a hip replacement. It added weeks onto her healing process and she never put two and two together. Another woman whose doctor told
her she was dehydrated, refused to drink water. “I don’t like how it tastes,”bshe said.
Human beings are pretty stubborn, sometimes it serves us well, but at other times we simply refuse to do what’s good for us. A friend of mine pointed out that people don’t like doing what is inconvenient, like seeing a doctor or doing physical therapy.
Islamic Persian scholar, Rumi, said, “The wound is where the light enters you.”
Buddhist poet and singer, Leonard Cohen, said, “There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.”
There is healing at the end of convalescence. There is relief at the end of pain. When the clouds part, the sun shines through. We don’t know how long it will take or how it will occurbut if we work with ourselves instead of against us, we see that the body is a
miraculous thing. It is programmed to heal if we just let it do its job.
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