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Showing Up

February 2, 2005

I've had a full-on six weeks. They started with my sister's death, and moved on to the joys of Christmas and a wonderful camping holiday with the kids.

December's funeral for Judith, to the accompaniment of myriad birds in her beautiful country garden, reminded me: it's the simple things that matter. Lying in the tent beside an alpine lake a few weeks later, listening to Megan and Andrew breathing softly in their sleep, I felt I had everything I could possibly want.  

As always, I took away on holiday an eclectic bunch of books. I normally shun stuff about Hollywood celebrities, but this time I read Michael J Fox's autobiography. The title - Lucky Man - piqued my interest, not just because I regard myself as exactly that but because I knew of Fox's battle with Parkinson's disease.

One passage particularly struck me. Fox was convalescing after dangerous, but successful, brain surgery to treat the tremor in his left arm. Lying on a Bahamian beach, he became aware that the tremor had returned - but to the other, previously good, arm. So, what, he asked, was I supposed to do now?:

The answer was clear. After all that I'd been through, after all I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could with whatever lay in front of me.

Show up. That, for all of us, is the key.

Renowned cancer physician Rachel Naomi Remen used the same phrase in the PBS television series, Healing and the Mind:

The worst thing in life is not death. The worst thing would be to miss it. A friend of mine ... says all spiritual paths have four steps: show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and don't be attached to the results. I think the great danger in life is not showing up.

How do we "miss" life"? By sleepwalking though it. Pursuing goals that, in the end, just don't matter. Neglecting the essentials.

I still sleepwalk most of the time. Each year, however, I try to get a little better at showing up. That, for 2005, is my simple goal.