Bruce Mode 2

You better listen to me baby:
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
You wake up in the night, with a fear so real.
You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come.
So don't waste your time waiting . . . . Bruce Springsteen in "Badlands"

Day 166. Yes, I'm squirmy at typing that number. I'm also trying (without too much ego) to demonstrate my progress at being unattached to it. This will take more time. It has been difficult to find Zen teaching that literally addresses obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I have to read between the lines. Fortunately, Zen is so obtuse that it lends itself readily to subjective interpretation. When I am a more advanced scholar of Zen I may feel differently.

I am still in Bruce Mode. I had planned to write some personal associations to this section of my favorite Springsteen song. The Beast of Reality, however, has intervened, and I am preparing for a sorrow instead. The song segment is still relevant, however. I just hung up the phone following a long conversation with my son. He sustained a serious hand injury during spring football and has been working with an orthopedic specialist and a hand surgeon to heal it enough for surgery (I know, the irony of "getting better" enough to be cut upon is stark).

This week the hand surgeon broke the news that my son's hand (the left one, mildly dispensable for most of us, but he is left-handed) would not survive another serious blow without the risk of sustaining irreparable damage. The ligaments and tendons were torn off the bone, and shredded to the point that they can't be reattached. If injured again, his finger would have no movement and just atrophy against his hand. My son described it like this: "It's like my finger would be amputated but it would still be there to be in the way." Gifted (and reality-based) child that he is, he was quick to recognize that the chances of playing strongside safety on a D-1 college football team and not taking blows to your hands are calculated at nil to none. Neither of us ever imagined that the body part implicated in a career-ending injury would be his hand.

Springsteen sings, "Talk about a dream, try to make it real . . . You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come . . ." This man/child has hoped to play college football since the ripe old age of four, when he insisted that his formal portrait for the year be taken in his Dallas Cowboys jersey holding his Dallas Cowboys helmet. He worked a gazillion times harder to get to play than the scholarship athletes surrounding him. It's looking like that moment of playing in a game for his university just isn't going to come. Sometimes, Reality bites.

I'm thinking about the resiliency workshop I attended on Friday, especially the part where the presenter mentioned the probability that a "resiliency gene" has been discovered. I think we have that gene. Tonight's conversation with my son meandered from denying the injury, to magical thinking, to sorrow, to grief, to spirituality, to gratitude for his brilliant mind and the option of "starring" in academics, to (trust my son to come up with this) the possibility of trying out for his school's soccer team. We talked about our common themes of trusting the Universe and allowing all the feelings that surround major life transitions to wash over and through him. With his typical maturity and uncanny wisdom (he's the oldest soul I know), he told me that his best friend and girlfriend (both of whom play varsity sports at his school) were behind him and totally supportive of him giving up football and that " . . . their love keeps (this) in perspective and is what really matters." I threw my love into the equation, and we concluded that the tragedy was survivable.

I'd love to take credit for my cultivating my son's resiliency, but I suspect he arrived in the world already extraordinarily strong. I will take credit for loving him with every molecule of my being. Together, we'll survive this junction. With Bruce and the Buddha at our beckoning, how could we not?

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc