musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Who is the message, and who the bottle?


There are times when, sitting alone in the house, it occurs to me to wonder about the immensity that surrounds me; to wonder if I really am an island -the 17th century poet John Donne notwithstanding. I am islanded alone in my body surrounded by the boundless sea of experiences only I have chanced to have, and whatever I do, or write, is merely my loneliness reaching out to other islands -messages in bottles, perhaps…

In a way, I suppose I’m lonely for a past which I can never recapture -or a future which I can’t reach, except by guessing. And when I try to think of the accident of my existing here, right now, floating in the immensity of chance, dancing in the ma -the space between things- I am forever humbled. Is it supposed to be like that?

Are these kinds of ruminations unique to humans? Do animals ever question their paths through Life? Or would we brush off considerations like that, wrapped as we are in the web of our hubris, and enmeshed in our desperate attempts to escape the need for atonement?

What constitutes loneliness anyway? Of the three types that the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson feels exist, (loneliness for the past which is gone; loneliness for the future, which is not yet here; and the profound loneliness of infinity), it is ‘the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love,’ that most intrigues me. Why? Because it doesn’t seem to need Time; as the Bulgarian born essayist and author, Maria Popova, puts it, that type of loneliness ‘deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.’

Let’s face it, we are creatures of Time -it’s where we live, where we think, where we long for things we had, or want. And yet the more we investigate it, the more chaotic and unpredictable it seems; unlike Time though, loneliness does not seem fractal -it is not a never-ending similar pattern, and no more like a Mandelbrot set than are its causes. Loneliness is unique, I think -perhaps because each of us is unique, and we attempt to grapple with our worlds differently. Even two people crossing the same bridge cross different bridges… each time, perhaps…

Some of us see loneliness as a challenge, and some as a bottomless pit with no handholds to escape. I am reminded of an Oscar Wilde quote: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?’ It’s wisdom like that which seems to relegate me to the ma I described before; wandering, lost, in its formlessness and forever seeking a boundary, an edge to grasp  even if it is always just beyond my reach.

*

Even on the coldest mornings I would see her sitting on the same bench overlooking the often turbulent waters of the Burrard Inlet. Although dressed appropriately for whatever the weather, she still seemed old and frail; in a gust of wind I would see her gnarled fingers clutch at the bench-railing as if to keep from being blown away. That both of us were either creatures of habit, or felt the need to punish ourselves I could only guess.

For me though, the lonely meander along the trail by the shore wasn’t a penance, or even self-reproach, but more like a need to escape from the utter sameness of my home. I’m not sure what I hoped the early morning exercise would accomplish, except perhaps debut a variation on a different theme -a time when the world included more than me.

The elderly lady would raise her eyes from her lap when I passed and smile at me. But I sensed that the smile was more of a diversion than a greeting. She, too, seemed to live inside her head somewhere, and her smile was an atavism that surfaced with novelty, not recognition.

One windy morning with snow in the forecast, I thought I heard her cough as I passed. Actually it was more of a rattle -something one might make if it was too onerous a task to fully clear one’s lungs of phlegm. Her eyes briefly brushed my cheek and then dropped again to her lap as if it had been a mistake to let me hear her lungs creaking like that… I took it as an invitation for me to stop and talk to her for once.

“Cold morning, eh?” I said, immediately embarrassed at the banality of my observation.

A real smile appeared on her face as she nodded. “We always used to sit here…” she answered, obviously not yet sure how much to reveal to me. “It was like it was our place, our bench for a time each morning, no matter the weather…” She stopped and looked down at her lap for a moment. “Everybody has a special place somewhere, don’t you think?”

I nodded, but more to be polite; I wasn’t sure I had one. Maybe the coffee shop with the guys on Wednesdays, but one by one, they’d stopped coming, and I grew tired of sitting by myself at the empty table and pretending they might  show up. Or maybe my phone was the world to which I used to subscribe, but despite always carrying it with me in my pocket, no one seemed to have my number anymore.

I felt her eyes examining me again. “Do you live around here?” she asked, forcing herself to be polite to the stranger who had stopped in front of her I suppose.

I shook my head; I wasn’t sure what else to say. Did I live in my house, or in the gaping silence behind my eyes; it was hard to commit to a residence. Even in my head I lived alone.

“I think this will be my last time you’ll see me here,” she said with a wan smile. “It’s just not the same without him…”

“Where will you go?” I asked, but again cursed myself for the awkward and perhaps intrusive question.

She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed. “I don’t know,” she finally answered as her eyes flitted across the stormy water to the ships clinging tenuously to their anchors. Then, as she struggled to stand upright in the wind, she focussed her eyes on me again. “Does anybody really know where they’re going?” Leaning on her cane, she hobbled away from me along the path, and then suddenly stopped, turned her head towards me, and waved goodbye.

I never saw her again, but I wonder if she actually knew where she was headed. I almost wished I hadn’t asked, though…

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gozzter

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