keely – Page 45 – State of Wilderness

Pardon The Interruption: What I Have Learned From My Time in the Chair

So it has been about ten weeks since my accident that resulted my injury, and cessation of normal life for a while. It might be a few more weeks until I am walking again. The past month or so, I have been working on my physical rehabilitation with the goal of walking by mid-March. The weather has been so nice that it has been driving me crazy to be stuck inside and not able to go hiking. I have been spending some time outside a little in the wheelchair, watching the kids or brushing the dogs, just enjoying the outdoors. (I even tried to take it around the block for a spin, but that proved much more difficult than I anticipated).
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time reflecting on what happened, why, and what I can take away from this. These are the ways I have grown and the things I have learned from this experience the past couple of months:

) The world has much more good in it than bad: sometimes it is easy to dwell on the scary stories we see in the news, and we lose sight of the fact that human nature is inherently good. You might start to believe that all human beings operate in their own self-interest without consideration for what is fair or right. However, if you actually interact with people while you are on crutches or in a wheelchair or otherwise injured, you will see, through the actions of others, that humans are overwhelmingly good. I have been amazed at how many people go out of their way to open doors, carry things, help me get situated. Complete strangers show compassion in unexpected places. My friends have made extraordinary gestures. If the 80/20 rule applies in this situation, I would say that 80% of people go out of their way to help another person in need, and that is truly touching to see.

2) Compassion for the ill and wounded: I am hoping that if nothing else, this experience has taught me how to better care for other people, maybe someone in this same situation or a situation with similar conditions. Maybe this is the primary lesson – maybe I would need this empathy to help a loved one later on in life through a debilitating illness or injury.

For about five weeks, I could hardly get around besides moving from the bed to the couch to the bathroom and back again. I was bored out of my mind. I truly appreciated just having someone spend some time with me. There were simple pleasures, like sweet treats brought or sent to me by friends and family, a particular lotion or comfortable outfit, some new movies to watch. The fact that my little family unit here at the house suddenly had to cook for me, to bring me food and drink, to help me with pillows and blankets was something I appreciated. What if I didn’t have these people? J was amazing as my nurse and aid – helping me get cleaned using a shower chair, making sure I had what I needed at hand, helping me get dressed, cleaning my wounds and changing my bandages – I really had to rely on him and maybe someday he will rely on me in the same way, and I hope I can be as calm and patient of a caregiver as he was.

3) Understanding of what it is like to be handicapped: I think I am going to look at the world in a different way now. It is so easy to kind of look past people with handicaps without really dwelling on how hard their life can be, in terms of dealing with just even the day to day challenges of getting cleaned, dressed, toiletry and bathing, cooking and eating – the basic aspects of life as a human. Getting around, participating in the same activities of life as other people presents even greater challenges. While I was out of work, they built a handicapped ramp to get into my building, and installing rails in my bathroom there. Thank God, that would have been impossible to navigate without. Dealing with bathrooms in restaurants, getting in and out of other buildings, enjoying the outdoors in the same ways I used to have all presented their own challenges.

4) Virtues of online shopping: this last one is one Jason probably wishes I didn’t figure out. He probably didn’t mind that I did all the Christmas shopping this way, and he hardly had to get out to the stores to get anything. There were additional temptations, though. I realized through this process that if I wanted something, it was only a click of a button away, and it made it so much easier for me to spend money on it. Also, because this door had been opened (the “Christmas Gift Gateway?”), online ads were suddenly more compelling to me. On the other hand, though, I learned the dark side of online ordering, which actually probably worked in our financial favor. I learned that it is probably better to try on clothes at the store than buy them online, that having a product in hand is probably better than having it delayed or get lost in shipment, and that you can’t judge the quality of a product from its picture online. Three dresses, three books, and three delayed gifts is all it took to teach me these lessons, which now act as a sort of vaccine against making more online purchases. However, I did get exposure to some awfully interesting sites, like Amazon and Etsy, that I have gotten a little obsessed with.

5) Take the time while you have it: because you never know what might happen. In some ways I thought I had been being good about this, but as I lay in my bed weeping about the things I wanted to do with my children that I couldn’t now, I realized I wasn’t soaking it all in. I think I am better than some at making plans about what I want to do, and carrying them out, but there is a lot of room for improvement in there, too.

6) Appreciate the little things: like being able to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom without a big production, like being able to make your own meal, or go out to eat to celebrate a birthday, like laying on your left side to snuggle with your honey at night. There were a lot of little things I was taking for granted, but I will be savoring every one of them from now on!

That’s probably not all; I am sure I will think of more later. I am also making another kind of list – the list of things I want to do when I get better again, the things I am looking forward to when I am finally cleared to head back to my normal life. I am looking forward to sharing those adventures as they unfold in the near future.

Off-Beat San Francisco: Bay Area Blooms

If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

Or..you can just find some to gawk at and take pictures of like we did…
July 2 2012

The last three shots are mine, from the Fort Mason Community Garden. The others are Jason’s, found along the way to the places I dragged us to. If you know the name of these, particularly the brown ones, post and let me know!

Off-Beat San Francisco

July 2, 2012

Who goes to a crematorium when they visit a new town?

Crazy geocachers, that’s who.

Scenes from Columba:

Oh, and another boon – AJ has decided he wants to be interred here when he goes, in the Columbarium in San Francisco. They are building a new Hall of the Olympians that he thought was really intriguing.

Yosemite’s Treasure

So, after talking to a friend who has seen my posts, I realized I needed to clarify, for those who might have missed my ButterFingers and a Broken Leg post, that these stories I am posting now are from the past. They are stories from the road trip that we took this summer. I am still recovering from my broken leg and am not out hiking around in the West in the moment. My days are spent on the couch, in my bed, and lately also at my office some days, and at physical therapy the others. I am hoping I can be hiking again by this summer, and walking again in the spring. For now, I am stuck on crutches, teaching the muscles of my ankle and leg how to walk again.

I will post the dates of the stories from now on.

We reached Yosemite on July 1, after hiking around the Mono Lake area and getting a little dehydrated. I think the youngest boy was just wiped out from the rough night in the tent the night before, because he fell asleep pretty soon after we got into the park. So, regrettably, the only views of Yosemite were ones we got from the car window and a few parking lot stops. We kind of wanted to go hiking, of course, but also we were all worn out from the morning and also thought there would be time for that the next day. We had miraculously gotten camping reservations in the park and were headed to the Valley, hoping we could find a place to wash the pee out of the youngest’s sleeping bag.

The above shots were on the way to the Valley.
So the first problem with Yosemite was this: everyone loves Yosemite. We were certainly not alone in the park. Our early stops had a lot of people around, but once we got into the Valley, there was no breathing room at all. Our search for a place to get some food and wash a sleeping bag were fruitless. There were no parking spots available in all the lots we were trolling around in. We were short in patience and high in frustration. Finally we decided to get out of there.
On the way out of the park, the adults in the vehicle had made the decision that we would forego our camping reservations for the night and head for a hotel, due to the pissy sleeping bag and the sheer exhaustion we were feeling. But little K missed that part of the conversation, and when we pulled up to Crane Flats to sit in the line at the campsite headquarters just to tell them they could give our site to someone else, we discovered the second problem with Yosemite.
The second problem? Bears. No, we didn’t see any, but the bears are notorious in this park for raiding vehicles for food. I had read so many warnings about this before we got here that I had been OCD about keeping the rental car food-smell-free this whole trip. I had talked to the kids about this, probably to the point that I caused them paranoia as well. How much it was affecting them, though, I didn’t know until this moment, when we pulled up at the site.
Suddenly, the little one was awake, and screeching, and holding his stomach. He told us his stomach hurt, hurt so bad. NO, he had to go to the bathroom really bad, that was it!, he says, but he was crying and distraught. I ended up getting out of the car and walking up to the ranger shack to ask them if I could just walk him to the bathroom in the campsite, and they told me that actually it would be faster to walk to the nearby gas station. I let them know about our canceled reservation, and a horrible scene then ensued in said bathroom, as I tried to insist my son actually use the bathroom and he tried to tell me that he didn’t have to and he was suddenly fine.
And maybe he was right, after all. Because he was fine, as soon as we started putting distance between us and that campsite, and I came to realize that his stomachache was really just a case of extreme anxiety about camping there, due to his picking up my bear preoccupation and distorting it into a actual phobia. Arktophobia or ursophobia, depending on who you believe.
I think it was safe to say that although we were all excited about the idea of a nice hotel room in San Francisco, he was easily the most excited of all of us.
Here are some of the views we did get in before we left.

Also, one last clarification. In my last three entries, the Mono Lake MonoMyth series, I was trying to use elements of our journey to represent parts of the “hero’s journey”, or “monomyth”. This is a literary device described by Joseph Campbell that allegedly is evident in some of the classic stories of our times; Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. Ancient religious figures were held up against this story frame and it could be diagrammed the same way: Buddha, Moses, Christ. In a way, it could be said to be a classical structure of a myth.
Well, in this framework, towards the end, the hero is said to obtain a “boon”: a great gift that is bestowed upon the hero. Part of the quest of the hero is the decision to share this boon with the rest of the world, or keep it to themselves as a sacred secret. In the words of Campbell: “This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven.”

Well, in our case, our journey did have a boon, and I don’t know if I can put it into words yet the meaning of it. But it was this moment that made the whole journey worthwhile for me and my oldest son; standing in Yosemite Valley, looking up at the face of El Capitan. I told him stories about men who had climbed it before, and he looked me in the eye and said he would like to be one of those one day, that he would like to learn how to climb so he can come back one day and conquer this mountain.
I have a mountain or two of my own that I have been inspired by, so I hope he does, and I hope this boon is something that came alive in him this day that we have yet to see fully materialize. I do know, though, that even now, a half a year later, if you ask him, like I did just now, what his favorite part of his vacation was, he will tell you, “Yosemite.
El Capitan.”