Now this one made me laugh out loud: “Life is a quest”…….and I immediately added an “ion” to that final “t”…..and my laughter settled into a more solid knowing place….a place of sad, agonized yet somehow comforting place within me.
Life is a question.
In fact, Life is nothing but questions, if we are to be brutally honest. Sure we pretend to have the absolute answers to those infinite questions …a regular pretense to help keep us sane…if we think we have found an answer, it feels like a piece of solid ground to stand on in a constantly changeable and turbulent world…but we all know that answers are not forever things…that answers are tricky ….that answers can be as false as often as they are true, and whatever they are, they are only that for the instant that we believe in them….and so, taking all that into account, I guess you could say that Life is a quest: a constant unremitting quest for the answers that will stay with us, assure us, sustain us, nourish us for longer than the time it takes to catch a breath.
Breath is the quest, I would say. Long, slow, deep, nourishing, satisfying breath.
Breath is really all we have.
Since moving to the asthma capital of the world, allergy central Michigan (who knew?), breath has become extremely important to me because I finally understand how and perhaps why I have not been able to catch mine for years now. And all along, i thought it was because i moved to that city famous for its hills: San Francisco…..and that the fault was mine because i was simply too out of shape to do all that climbing!
So i treated the entire city as my gym, and even went to an actual gym regularly to build my strength, my endurance. And for years i managed that city.
But finally, whatever brought asthma to my body caught up with me and I remember trying to get to our car one night after a large meal at a favorite café and wondering why the hell i simply had the most awful time getting up that hill to the car.
It bewildered me, and of course scared the hell out of me because i experienced such an impossibility breathing…i thought I am going to die right here, right now on this hill.
But I didn’t die, I just continued to roam the city experiencing a worsening and a worsening of my ability to breathe.
When I went to have it checked, the guy tested me, decided I had Minimum Obstructive Airways Disease and gave me a simple Albuterol , a simple rescue inhaler with no instructions other than to manage it on my own. Asthma was never mentioned.
Little by little, especially after my dear friend and ex-husband Paul died, I cocooned into my life, giving up breath and effort, using a cane, managing, resorting to wheelchairs at all airports (once I realized there was no way I was gonna walk from all those distant arrival gates) and I found I liked being treated like the invalid I was slowly becoming….airports are much much easier if you ask for a wheelchair when you book your first class flights. Even if I didn’t suffer from asthma,I think I’d still ask for wheel chair assistance…it’s a luxury those of us in our late 70’s have earned, I believe.
Anyway, now life here in recently newly homed Michigan (in a fine old house filled with dust naturally) is indeed a quest because my asthma has, as they say “exacerbated” and I am a mess! So I quest for relief. My poor old de-conditioned body just aint having it! I’ve much work ahead of me….which is good….
…why good?
Because in retirement to the fields and pastures of rural Michigan, besides my writing, what the hell else should I spend my time doing? Unpacking our hundreds of moving boxes?
Who the hell has the strength and breath for that?
Not moi!
The very thought makes me breathless.