Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.

— Anonymous

Recently, it was brought home to me how quickly things can change.  It seems that a columnist from the Times in London, Melanie Reid, who had been riding horses competitively for 30 years, fell off while doing some cross-country jumps and broke her neck.  In the amount of time it took her to fly through the air and land on her face in the dirt, her life changed drastically.

More Than You Can Handle

It is a measure of how important writing is to her that despite the fact that she can’t physically write or type she is still writing columns on a semi-regular basis.  She writes about how she moved from total control to total dependency, about being so sick that she’s not even aware how ill she is, and about the double edged sword of pain relief – the morphine hallucinations that lasted even after the morphine had been discontinued.  At the end of her first article she writes, “I just have to come to terms with the fact that I’m lucky to be here at all. And in my head I am fiercely alive.”

Here is a woman whose entire life has been changed in a split-second and she is figuring out how she can cope with what little function she has left – what she will need help with and what she will be able to do on her own.  And through it all, her tough-mindedness and resilience shine through.

There is a saying that “God never gives you more than you can handle.”  Being a great big chicken, I prayed that I not be able to handle much ’cuz I didn’t want to face huge overwhelming challenges.  The thing is that what’s huge and overwhelming to you or me is not so bad for someone else.  But in the end, we seem to get stretched whether we volunteer or not.

Coping with the Huge and Overwhelming

In her writing, Melanie has outlined a number of tactics that can help get us hold on to our serenity:

• Decide what is important
• Notice small changes for the better
• Be in charge of your thoughts

Decide What is Important

The first change Melanie noticed was her ability to control her life.  Once she was on that backboard, she realized that things were going to happen at the pace of the hospital, not her pace.  She could talk until she was blue in the face, but needless to say, her care was contingent on things she didn’t know and didn’t understand.  Over time, she came to an acceptance of her new role and what her attitude needed to be in order to make it through.

I have stopped fighting the system on that. There are some things you’ve just got to take your time with. That yearning for a Starbucks fades into the yearning for a cup of watery NHS tea — and I’ve reached a point where, if I can’t have these things, it doesn’t matter because I know I’ll get them in the end.

Notice Small Changes for the Better

Time passes slowly when you’re at the mercy of everyone else’s schedule.  You’re lonely and there’s no one to talk to and no way to get in touch with them.  People show up to visit when you’re tired and want to sleep instead of visiting.  It’s very easy to get into a mindset that says that nothing is changing, and nothing will ever change.

In my post, What – Me Worry? I pointed you to an article, Our Brain’s Negative Bias which reported that our brains react more strongly to negative stimuli.  What that means is that we have to focus on finding the positive.  The ratio suggested by research was 5:1.  If we don’t focus on finding the positive, we’re apt to tip over into discouragement, depression or worse.

Melanie instinctively seems to understand that she needs to find positives that she can build on.

The nurse who looked after me when I came off the ventilator, said that I was lucid and bright, and I’d impressed the anaesthetist, because while he was talking about my condition, he mentioned ASB and I said, what’s ASB? (It’s something to do with assisted breathing.) And as he was explaining, I instinctively took her [the nurse’s] hand as if it was a reporter’s notebook and began writing down the answer. It amuses me that even post-spinal operation I was thinking of my job.

Be in Charge of Your Thoughts

We think ourselves into some awful places.  For me, it can be my ability to project the worst case into the future.  What if this isn’t a cold, it’s the H1N1 virus?  ARRRGH!!  What if the plane crashes?  What if…  Trust me, you don’t want me to share any more awful scenarios.  Melanie quickly figured out that she wouldn’t come out of her recovery quickly or well if she didn’t control her thoughts.

What I’ve learnt is that every day, out there, is a whirlpool of despair. It is like the Corryvreckan, the tidal race [whirlpool] north of the island of Jura, and every day I have to chart my course around the edges of it.

You have to do this deliberately, because if you get sucked into it, you can drown in despair. You cry and cry, and all that happens is that the tears run into your ears, the Elastoplast on the nasal feeding tube gets soaked, your nose gets even more stuffed up than normal, and you feel wretched. So, tears are rubbish.

None of Us Are in Charge

Much as I’d like it to be different, many of the things that happen to us in life are neither our choice nor our fault.  Here in the US, we tend to over-believe in our ability to control things.  If nothing else, this latest recession should convince us that we aren’t in control.  And much as we’d like to blame “them”, I’m not sure what names to attach to “them” and the more we understand about what happened, the more we realize that “they” weren’t in control either.

We’ve all done dumb things.  We’ve all done smart things.  We’ve all been lucky.  We’ve all been unlucky.

I have never met anyone who chose to struggle with depression… or bipolar disease… or Alzheimer’s… or cancer… or a broken neck.  We don’t choose our challenges, somehow they choose us.  Neither Christopher Reeve nor Melanie Reid chose to sacrifice their mobility for the joy of competitive horseback riding.  But neither did they choose to sacrifice that joy to avoid the potential pain.

In the end, the key to serenity is to get through our challenges as best we can – to find gratitude for little things every day – to find pieces of joy to counterbalance the pain – to choose to grow through the challenge.  I think the long version of the Serenity Prayer says it best:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

— Reinhold Niebuhr