Breathing

My manager has a brother who is a classically trained violinist. He studied at Julliard, one of the most respected music schools in the world, and his father was also a musician. When the brother was twenty-three years old, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the doctors estimated that the cancer would give him only a few months to live. He is now forty-six years old and is the longest-surviving person on earth not to have gone into remission with that type of cancer.

As a result of the cancer, this brother lost all sensation in his fingertips, which meant he could no longer play violin when he had finished treatment. The brother was devastated, as playing the violin had been his passion, his talent, and his plan for his life since he was a little boy. He moved to Taiwan, where he got a degree in Chinese. Not long after, as a result of the radioactive chemotherapy the brother had undergone during his cancer treatment, he went deaf, meaning he could no longer read tones on lips, which is an essential element in understanding Chinese. Over the next twenty years, the brother has tried small pursuits here and there, but it always seems that the rug is pulled out from under him, that his goal is stolen away. Now, at forty-six, he is still a bachelor, and still trying to deal with the rage he feels. My manager feels so deeply for her brother, and for the fact that he is still grieving, but she cannot change his situation. All she can do is pick up the phone or sit at a bar with a couple of beers and say, "I'm here."

Sometimes, no matter what degree of empathy we feel we can access, or what degree of hopefulness we wish to bestow out of our own personal optimism for those we deeply love, all we can do - and perhaps all that is needed in the moment - is to just be there, to be a human being, not a human doing, or a human fixing, as I try to be. There comes a moment when we have to be willing to just sit and listen. For some people, time is the only elixir strong enough to numb or alter their pain. For some others, even time is not a potent enough balm. There is a literal 'mourning' period after a piece of someone's identity is disestablished, and it is impossible to glean whether that period will last a few months or the rest of a lifetime.

I am learning a painful lesson in unselfishness. If you truly care about someone, you have to find a way to put your desires and your wants on the shelf and to step away from the situation, if that's what is needed. It may hurt like hell to stare at the ceiling for hours on end in the dead of night, to reach for the phone and then delicately return it to the same spot, but it is the necessary. I discovered a photograph of a prayer tablet from an Asian temple, and it reads, "I wish that the happiness of other will always be enough to outweigh the miseries of my own life." I aspire to live this as my credo. It is agonizing on some days, and it bears many sleepless nights and silent tears, yet I also tend to believe that love is the embodiment of unselfishness, and that love, in the end, reigns supreme.

I found myself sitting on the edge of a pier yesterday morning, early enough so that the only other person around was the odd fisherman, patiently combing the deep. I leaned against an iron railing, staring at orange and magenta starfish below, watching the sun dancing on the lapping waves, and I cried. I sank down to the deck and called my mother, who listened to my story. She then said, "Chelsea, you're at an age and a time in your life when everything is just so.. intense. Life is intense, everything is a great high or a great low. That's just the way it feels when you're young, you feel so so much. But as you get older, and as you get older with someone, you learn to know each other's little quirks and ways, and life smooths out somehow. You learn to be comfortable with each other, to laugh with each other over the things you fought about when you were in your twenties. If it is not meant to be, you will grow as a person and move toward the right direction. If it is meant to be, then time will make it so. And when it does come together, it will be even stronger."

As I listened to my mother's words, I saw two whales jumping in the surf, as a pair, something which I had never seen before, and I actually gasped into the phone. Then I saw a flock of birds soar across the ocean crest, following each other in solidarity. As cheesy as even I realize it sounds in the retelling, it was stunning. Even in moments of extreme pain, the world does not stop living, does not stop breathing. And that is what I will do, for now. I will breathe.

The storm is coming but I don't mind.
People are dying, I close my blinds.

All that i know is I'm breathing now.

I want to change the world...instead I sleep.
I want to believe in more than you and me.

But all that I know is I'm breathing

All i can do is keep breathing

All we can do is keep breathing now.

-"Keep Breathing", by Ingrid Michaelson