It was 1988 and a friend of mine,\u00a0Michael, was in the hospital. He had been diagnosed with AIDS and back then, it\u00a0meant that he wouldn\u2019t be here for much longer. There were no cocktails to
fight the virus and the only drug available was reportedly killing people at\u00a0the same time that it was prolonging their lives. A very bad and terrifying\u00a0reality.<\/p>\n
Michael had contracted an AIDS\u00a0related opportunistic infection called Pneumocystis Pneumonia. He knew that his\u00a0days were limited and he was thinking about how to live the rest of his short\u00a0life. He made some phone calls while I was there and he made dates and times\u00a0for people he knew to visit him. After he called one particular person, I was\u00a0surprised. \u201cI thought you didn\u2019t like him very much,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d he said, \u201cbut what if\u00a0making peace with him is the last thing I have to do here? I don\u2019t want to miss\u00a0anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the next week, Michael saw\u00a0friends who were dear to him but he also saw a few who were not. He had a few\u00a0difficult conversations but each time someone left, he looked lighter and more\u00a0at peace. He had made the choice between war and peace. He had opened his heart\u00a0to release the blame and embrace compassion. He didn\u2019t want to take any dark\u00a0energy with him when it was time to go.<\/p>\n
I was fascinated by what he was\u00a0doing. One afternoon, when I had left his room and I was walking down the\u00a0hospital corridor on my way to the elevators, I stopped. What if I did what Michael\u00a0was doing right now? What if I didn\u2019t wait until I was on my death bed? What if
I made sure that each time I left someone, nothing was left unsaid? I decided\u00a0to treat each phone call or meeting as if it were the last one, as if I would never\u00a0see that person again and I didn\u2019t want anything hanging in the air. If\u00a0something was off, I decided to look inside instead of blaming someone else.<\/p>\n
Pema Chodron said, \u201cRather than\u00a0letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right\u00a0now, we feel like a piece of shit and we\u2019re not squeamish about taking a good\u00a0look.\u201d<\/p>\n
That became my spiritual practice\u00a0and it still is. I don\u2019t wait to say what I want to say. Within reason of\u00a0course. If something that I have to say will be unnecessarily hurtful, I work\u00a0it out for myself. I don\u2019t want to use truth as a weapon. I want to use it as a\u00a0compassionate way to honor a friendship. I do my best to open my heart, even in
times of conflict and when I do, I can see the people who drive me crazy as my\u00a0teachers. I\u2019ve learned that I don\u2019t have to agree with someone to make peace\u00a0with them. They don\u2019t have to agree with me. The only thing we have to agree\u00a0upon is that we want to end the conflict.<\/p>\n
I had a friend who was ill and I\u00a0visited her regularly. I acted as if this were the last time I would ever see\u00a0her and one day it was true. When her lungs gave out and she died, I felt\u00a0complete with her, not because it had all gone smoothly. It hadn\u2019t. She was a\u00a0powerful woman in the film industry and she had a short fuse. I had been the
recipient of her anger more than once but each time, I had decided to let it\u00a0go. I followed a Buddhist philosophy: If there are people who we see as\u00a0obnoxious, threatening or worthy of contempt, we could discover a lot about\u00a0those very aspects of ourselves that we can\u2019t face.<\/p>\n
My friend offended a lot of people\u00a0during her career and when she was gone, she left some \u00a0relationships up in the air. Several of her people hadn\u2019t spoken with her in a long time and once she was gone, there was no way to reconcile. She had not done what Michael had done. Sometimes telling the truth is hard. I don\u2019t know how that had affected her but I saw the upset in the people who had known and loved her.<\/p>\n
In our world of insane politics,\u00a0there is a twisted belief that the way to find peace is to go to war. They say\u00a0we need more guns to fight guns. More violence to fight violence. More killing\u00a0to fight killing. More fear to fight fear. To me, that\u2019s an upside down way of looking
at things. The saying goes that we \u201ccultivate\u201d compassion as if it were a\u00a0flower that needs water, air and constant attention.<\/p>\n
When we plant a rose garden, we\u00a0start by clearing the ground of weeds so the flowers don\u2019t have to fight their\u00a0way to open up. We give them water and food. If we don\u2019t, they die a hard\u00a0death. If we do, they will die eventually like all living things, but they will
be glorious and beautiful for as long as they are meant to live. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was 1988 and a friend of mine,\u00a0Michael, was in the hospital. He had been diagnosed with AIDS and back then, it\u00a0meant that he wouldn\u2019t be here for much longer. There were no cocktails tofight the virus and the only drug available was reportedly killing people at\u00a0the same time that it was prolonging their lives. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}