I’m now officially well. Thanks so much for all your kind words, here and by phone and email. Here are some of the reasons why all that yuck, for me, was worth it:

The intense pain I experienced this last week has me thinking on the topic of suffering.  I’m wondering, do you think suffering can be quantified? 

When I’m not thinking, I don’t.  I mean, when I’m just feeling my own suffering, I’m not comparing it with anything.  I’m just…suffering.  I’m crying out.  I’m feeling angry.  Afraid.  Helpless.  Wanting it to end.  Now.

But when I am thinking, when I do get some perspective and look at the world beyond my body or set of circumstances, I often feel ashamed.  Ashamed of the way I experience my suffering because when compared with so many other peoples’, it looks so small.  Like a splinter or a boil.  I feel embarrassed for complaining and like I’ve disrespected all whose suffering is greater than mine by acting like mine is enormous.

But I’m wondering now whether that kind of shame just isn’t very fair – to me or anyone else.  Now that I’m thinking about my thinking, I’m wondering whether it’s just not fair to any of us to compare how much we hurt.

I’m thick in the stage of infant-care these days, so my mind goes quickly to all the people I know whose suffering is around babies.  I have friends who have been trying to get pregnant forever and still can’t.  I have friends who tried conceiving for a year, joyously became pregnant…and then discovered months later that their dear child has a serious genetic defect.  She was born last week and has already had major heart surgery.  She’s struggling for life in the ICU.  And I have friends who have lost babies.  Our neighbors had a baby the same week we did, and she cries constantly and isn’t gaining weight.  So many stories of suffering.  So many tears and anguished prayers and all the fear and anger and disappointment and depression you could ever not wish for.

So whose suffering is the worst?  Doesn’t the question sound wrong?  But…is it conceivably fair, in light of all of these stories, that I complain about my week of intense pain? – pain that antibiotics and few doctor visits took care of, and that came because I have a baby, a very healthy one, a mild-mannered one, actually, that took all of two months to conceive?

My suffering seems so stupid and small when put into broader perspective. 

And yet…  Couldn’t any of the people in these stories say the same thing of theirs, were they to compare their stories with ones that look more awful?  People slowly starving to death.  People living through decades of civil war.  Long-term, debilitating diseases.  I don’t know – any number of “worse sufferings” come to mind.

I don’t know how to think about this.  Or even feel.  I guess I’m wondering, though, whether the comparison game isn’t worth playing when it comes to this.  That maybe there are indeed varying degrees of suffering, but it’s just not good to try to identify them.  Could suffering just be suffering?  And maybe the way we experience it be just that – not good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, because of who we’re comparing ourselves to?

Thoughts, wisdom, ponderings all welcome.

So I have no idea how prayer and wishing work.  But I have a hunch they sometimes affect the way events unfold.  And there’s been some events in my life of late that I’d so like affected.

Three weeks ago I came down with mastitis (a fancy word to say infection in one of my breasts that started because of a clogged milk duct that would not get fixed despite every best effort toward that end).  A round of antibiotics took care of all the flu-like symptoms within a day, but the pain never went away.  For three weeks.  This last weekend the flu-like symptoms returned with a vengeance, and the pain, which had been about a 7 out of 10 for three weeks, ramped up to, oh, A TEN.  By Monday it was literally bringing me to tears.  I’ve never been in so much physical pain in my life.  I actually got to use the Lamaze techniques that were completely wasted on a scheduled cesarean birth.

Anyway.  I’ve been to the doctor every day this week.  I’m on a stronger antibiotic, and having the wound aspirated daily, and the doctors are crossing their fingers that they won’t have to actually go to surgery to fix the problem, because that would mean stopping breastfeeding for good.

So I am one sick dog.  Low grade fever that spikes every evening, and just weak and tired and achy all over.  And of course I’m up many times day and night to feed the baby, meaning long stretches of rest are not possible.  Thankfully, my dear mom has come for the better part of the week and has been a great help through the daytime hours.  N and I are so grateful for her.

Whether or not this was all way more information than any of you wanted to hear, I am very up for prayers and good wishes heading this direction.  I want so badly to get better, and not to have to give up nursing.  And it would be just out of this world not to have to face that much pain again.

That’s all.  You think it’s worth a shot?

I’ve had a post getting written inside of me for a while now – following up on that last stream of them – but now that I actually have some space to type, I just don’t feel like writing about that.  I’m tired and not feeling sparkly at all.  I’ve a boy who is fighting sleep next to me.  A trunk load of imperishable groceries that I couldn’t unload yesterday before needing to feed him.  A pile of dirty laundry sitting next to the door.  I got about four hours of sleep last night, chopped up between feedings and changings and hot compresses to try to avoid mastitis again.

So the best I can do right now is to say hello.  And that maybe sometime in the near future I’ll have the spunk to write something a little more…read-worthy.  Once my dear kid can finally sleep, I’m gonna try to do the same.

So I’ve been sitting (read: nursing, burping, bouncing, bathing, changing, cooing, getting peed upon) with the question I asked myself in the last post – the question about whether there’s something I’m wanting to do that maybe I’m not doing because I’m afraid of getting dirty.  And I’ve come up with something.  But I don’t want to write about that yet.

I want to write about a question that helped me get there. 

Why try to do good in the world?  That’s it.  Why try to do good?  Simple enough, right?  Riiight…

I know this can be answered a hundred different ways, but as I’ve pondered some of them, I’ve realized I don’t like a lot of what’s available.

Guilt, for instance.  I know it can be a good catalyst in certain situations.  It isn’t all bad.  But to me it seems life-sucking as a primary motivator.  I think it poisons good with a kind of self-centeredness, an objectification of the people or environments in which the good is done.  Such things become tools, merely, for making the gooder (person doing good) feel better. 

I don’t know how to get completely away from guilt.  My life is privileged, so far as race and family and finances and education and a body that works well are concerned, and I’m well aware that there are lots of the opposites everywhere.  I didn’t ask for what I’ve got, and I’m pretty sure others didn’t either, and yet here we are.  Disparities galore. 

But here’s the rub: Maybe it’s this very thing – this very fact that no one asked for what they’ve got – that makes guilt not make much sense.  You think?

All of life’s disparities could lead to a kind of ethical motivation for doing good, then, I suppose:  good is just the right thing to do.  I, for example, am capable of doing good.  I’ve got a nice bundle of resources to work with (the privilege I talked about).  And let’s face it:  good is needed.  Everywhere.  Why not do it?

Something about this moves too much in the direction of guilt for my liking, though.  At least for now, as I continue detoxifying from the stuff.  It introduces obligation.  And not just obligation, but obligation with a ball and chain attached to it, shaped conspicuously much like an uptight judge.  He waits vigilantly for you to squander your life or talents or money or time, and even when he isn’t officially on your case for something, it feels like he is.  Because the “good” you do is always getting held up next to the million “bad” or selfish things you sometimes (regularly?) do instead.

No, “it’s the right thing to do” isn’t invitational or inspiring or soul-expanding at all for me.  It makes my soul shrink.  And my courage, too.

So I’ve thought a lot about the interconnectedness slant for doing good.  About how doing good for others is really a way of doing good for myself.  And for everyone.  Eastern thought has a lot of great things to say about this.  And physics, too.  And I’m filled with wonder as I consider how true it is, and how magical.  And how it makes me more patient and compassionate where I might not otherwise be.

But I have to admit that, here too, the idea falls flat for me.  Maybe if I spent more time meditating, and got myself more viscerally in touch with my connectedness with everything and everyone, I’d be spontaneously inspired toward positive action.  But until that happens, the idea gets stuck in the logical, unfeeling parts of myself, and doesn’t have the soulful steam of feeling to make my self go anywhere.  As interconnected with everything as I believe myself to be, I just don’t live in awareness of that very often, and the guy begging on the corner and the tree in the next complex over and the dog that yipped at my heals this morning don’t feel like parts of myself at all.  Caring for the earth or for the homeless or for animal rights or any other rights a person might care about because we’re all interconnected all consequently slip into that last category for me, the “because it’s the right thing to do (because we’re all interconnected)” category.  They’re less about genuine care and more about a concern that I’m trying to drum up because an abstract principle in my mind is telling me I really should do that kind of drumming.  Yesterday.  And you know how much I appreciate that kind of judge.

So how about we propose a psychological angle.  What if I try to do good because I want to be a person who does good.  And if I don’t actually do good, then I feel a disconnect between who I am and who I want to be.  Dissonance.  And I don’t fit in very well with the gooders I really want as friends.  I don’t have good gooder stories to tell when I’m with them and I can’t even get on soap boxes or high horses with them, either, because lord knows I was sitting on my couch last night, too, and I’ve never even been tempted to write my congressperson for anything.  Sigh.

No, trying to get rid of dissonance or spin a character or reputation or set of friends to be proud of just don’t feel like compelling reasons for me to do good, either.

And here’s what really trips me up:  I’m not convinced you can clearly define good anyway.  Snap shots can make good and bad appear simplistically separate, simplistically clear, but really, aren’t the two more often mixed up?  Sometimes it’s the most awful things, the most ugly or evil or extraordinarily pathetic, that lead to positive action.  Don’t they? Like figuring out tough class or race-related things in Katrina’s aftermath.  Like wounded people turning into healers.  Some of history’s biggest embarrassments have been the reason why myriad smaller tragedies haven’t happened, or have actually gotten cared about. 

And sometimes it’s the most well-intentioned things ever – the ones dreamed up by people doggedly committed to making the world a better place – that really, really screw things up.  Think manifest destiny.  Think over-protective parenting. Think any number of technological “advances,” and the Hiroshimas and global warmings and massive oil spills pluming in their wakes.

So.  What does it mean for me to “try to do good”?  What do I presuppose in even asking such a question?

While I won’t try answering that, I will give my conclusion.  You ready?

I know that “good” and “bad” are difficult to separate sometimes, and that the “good” I try to do may actually harm someone, or mess up something better.  But I’m thinking that’s par for this messy life-course.  And I’m certainly not excited about doing nothing because I convince myself that no matter what I do (or don’t do, as the case may be) is part of life’s yin and yang.

So my conclusion?  I want to try to do good in the world because that’s what I like to do.  I like it. It makes me hopeful.  I like it better than doing nothing, and I like it better than knowingly doing bad.  And heck if I understand my complex mix of motives better than that.

I just like it.  [And I’m looking forward to diving into the fray so I won’t have time for this kind of reflection. :)]

But how about you?  Why do you do good?  I’m genuinely curious.

So here are some skeletal conclusions I take from the last conversation:

·        Nothing is perfectly clean – no movement, no institution, no set of relationships.  This is true of spicy and boring lives.  Why not choose spicy?

·        Process matters.  How we work for change is important, and has a lot to do with the kind of change that gets accomplished…and how long-lasting the change turns out to be.  But process isn’t all that matters.  Sometimes messy processes – ones that leave hands and hearts a little dirty for a while – are worth it.  Dark and light are sometimes inextricably mixed.

·        There are instances where a person needs to distance him/herself from a particular group or movement.  Distance can be an important part of a person’s personal growth or healing, but can also be necessary for broader goals to have any chance of getting met.  Gaining trust with a group of disgruntled teens, for example, may necessitate distancing relations with teachers, parents, or police…even when said relations might further some other kind of good.

·        Sometimes, as in the example above, reputation really matters.  It isn’t a gimme that it’s better, as a rule, to care not a lick for how we’re perceived.  Sometimes, though, reputation needs to matter little.  If everyone involved in civil or women’s or gay rights movements cared what society thought of them, important strides forward or up or out would never get made.  I’m guessing smaller-scale, personal examples could be found of this being true as well…maybe cases where no one would know if you chose your reputation over kindness or forgiveness.  Or over getting dirty, but in so doing, participating in something really worthwhile.

·        Life is complicated.  For me right now, what all of this boils down to is being mindful and thoughtful and as awake as I can be in specific instances, rather than abstracting like this forever.  My question to myself becomes:  Is there some specific action I want to take in my life right now where I’m concerned about my own or others’ “cleanliness” – in terms of reputation?  process?  otherwise?  This is a question I need to sit with today.  Or more realistically, this week (can anyone say, “I don’t get very much done in a day – intellectually or otherwise – while caring for an infant”?).

What do you all think of these things?  I’d love to hear examples, like the one Chandra gave, of stuff like this in action – times when it seems worth staying clean or protecting one’s principles or reputation, and times when messiness seems far more worth it.

A couple great "responses" to the issues raised in my last post:

‘"I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.’  Armistead Maupin said this, wishing that he had "come out" as gay earlier in his life. But the comment might apply just as easily to lots of us who conduct our lives in fear of what other people think. Life is short, and then you die. No rehearsals."

via Maggi Dawn and

"No one should abandon duties
because he sees defects in them.
Every action, every activity, is surrounded
by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke."

(Bhagavad Gita, I8.47)

via Cindy Lawson.