Holding my breath

When I was little, and lying in my bed at night awake and scared, I would try to imagine the bad things before I fell asleep and dreamed them.

I would imagine three men walking through the dark woods towards my house (I lived on a gravel road in the deep woods of Virginia).

The three men would break in through the back sliding glass door and then climb the stairs to my bedroom and stand over my bed.

Holding my breath, still as a board, and with my eyes closed, I would imagine the three men discussing whether it was worth it to kill me or not.

“Hmmm,” they’d say, bending close to my face, “she’s not breathing! She must already be dead! Might as well leave her alone.”

They’d shrug, miffed that somebody beat them to the punch, then walk back down the stairs of my house and leave, without taking a single thing.

I would wait a few more seconds just to make sure the bad men of my imagination were gone, and then I’d release my breath in a huge pooof of stale air, turn on my lamp, pull my stack of Bible verses written on 3x5 index cards out of my nightstand drawer, and read them out loud till I fell asleep.

I practiced for the three bad men nightmare almost nightly.

Before evening prayers, my Dad, a jazz singer, would sit on the edge of my bed for our ritual singing contest. In our contest, we’d both take the biggest, deepest breaths we could, hold them till the count of three, and then let them out in one long “AHHHHH,” making sound until somebody started wavering and choking and practically turned blue, which made the other one the automatic winner.

I got really good at holding my breath.

This strategy: holding breath, has been my chosen coping mechanism for lots of things.

Even now, I’m thinking it could be a good idea.

I find myself thinking, “I just did CANCER. Do I really have to do another hard thing? Can I just hold my breath and wait for this to pass?”

It bears mentioning here that another one of my chosen nightmares was the apocalyptic nightmare.

In this one, I would lie in my bed and imagine the end of the world creeping towards my house. In my mind, I would run outside, dig a deep, deep hole, crawl down in it, cover the hole with a large galvanized bucket, and hide there until everything passed over.

None of the apocalyptic bad people ever bothered to wonder why a large galvanized bucket sat by itself in the backyard.

This was how I survived.

I did not try to fight or band together with survivors.

I did not outrun the apocalypse and escape with the remnant to the secret city in the mountains.

I played dead.

My strategy was: Freeze.

Wait for the threat to realize you’re not a threat in return. Wait for it all to pass. Feel sorry for yourself in the meantime.

I’ve been wrestling with this one over the last few weeks, before the coronavirus was really a thing, because life has asked me to reengage and I haven’t wanted to.

Phoenix is barely two months out from remission and I wanted a season of ease.

I didn’t want to figure out what to do with my part of the company I co-built over the last five years. I didn’t want to search out therapy options for my thirteen-year old or figure out why my 12-year-old is getting white bumps all over his skin. I didn’t want to sell two vehicles and reckon with medical bills and do our taxes.

I wanted a hall pass from life. I felt like I’d earned it.

Regardless of what I think my rights are in my tally of suffering vs. ease, it comes down to this: I can freak out about WHAT IS and feel victimized by it.

Or, I can shift my narrative from, “I just did CANCER. Do I really have to do another hard thing?” to “ I just did CANCER. I can do ANY hard thing.”

I can, like the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says, “receive WHAT IS, as it is, and let it teach me,” or I can reject it, fight it, or freeze in the face of it.

If I can receive WHAT IS and let it teach me, WHAT IS becomes the most potent, breath-filled, spacious place to be.

WHAT IS: Coronavirus on top of Cancer.

Well, here it is.

I refuse to play dead or put a bucket over my head.

I will receive WHAT IS, as it is, and I will fill the space between me and it with my breath, with all the lung capacity of a 39-year-old woman who has been holding it for much of her life.