Not Reasonable At All

May 2022

I wrote this on Twitter this weekend:

“I really used to live so entirely in my thoughts, which I could use with great skill to deduce and decode my emotions. But more and more tending to my heart is ascendant. I write these words so often in my journal now: ‘my heart, my heart’”

And someone I like and admire asked me I if could say more about this and so I shall try to do that here:

I negotiated the tornado that was my family of origin more like a meteorologist with expensive state of the art doppler radar than like an old farmer who knows a storm is coming from the ache in his bones. My analytic skills helped me create comforting illusions that I could not only anticipate but control for outcomes by assembling information and data in the proper way.

This kind of thinking also offered me the ability to “make my case” and sometimes persuade others about potential logical conclusions of the course of action they were engaging in. It was, and is still, surprising that so few people bother with these calculations, or know how to perform them at all.

I was also able to secure surrogate parenting, mentoring, and nurturing from teachers, authority figures, bosses, professors for being “smart” and somehow, it was also clear that if I was “not smart” I would be left to languish.

And the richest resource of all, my “smarts” helped me extract guidance, care, parenting and camaraderie in the words and imaginal worlds generated by the dead, left behind in books. Thinking was my salvation, my life line.

My constitution and my trauma history demanded that I take my broken heart into account. If I dared to ignore it my body would erupt in symptoms: moods, migraines, insomnia, fits of despair or impatience that took a significant amount of labor to function through. Psychotherapy, first discovered in college, seemed to unlock some of the secrets of managing my sore and unruly heart.

I took care of it like a begrudging nanny who didn’t really like her charge, and only tended to it so it wouldn’t scream. I’d weep and mourn because I had to, because it would all become unmanageable if I didn’t. Like the old Fisher King, who must spend a lifetime tending to wound that would never truly heal, I learned to live with my heart, as a matter of hygiene. As mandatory as flossing my teeth or changing a bandage. Not because I liked it, but because I had to.

I would forget sometimes, and other times I would try to forget, but my dreams would remind me that I had to engage in regular heart-maintenance or invite disruption. I got quite good at it, and all my methods of self-reflection and heart-analysis allowed me to conduct myself at near optimal levels.

Love surely existed, but it was more an oath of loyalty than an emotion, a concerted behavior, a disciplined praxis. If I had determined that my heart loved you, it transformed into an internal vow to be present for you, as available and useful for you as I possibly could. Love was a demand for committed action.

But then of course, all that became impossible. Cancer and chemotherapy blew it all over like a silly house of cards, breaking all of my determined promises as my capacity to carry others, to care for myself, collapsed entirely. And chemotherapy, for nearly three full years simply made it impossible to think. It punched big Swiss cheese holes in my memory, it slowed my thoughts down to the sound of a 45 vinyl record played on a turntable rotating at 33 1/3 rpm.

I couldn’t trust my thinking. I couldn’t figure out anything any more. If my train re-routed or skipped my station in a city I’ve lived in forever, my blood pressure would soar, fearful that I might not be able to figure out the way back home.

My doppler radar broke all the way down and I was left only with the ache in my bones to negotiate the weather. I suddenly had to rely on my heart. Its hopes, pains, wounds, sorrows, compassion, excitements - became my primary guide to negotiate the environment.

“Sounds like a great idea!” or “This is something that absolutely should be done.” for reasons of logic or prudence or justice or fairness could no longer carry me through. The only thing that could guide my decisions were questions like:

Does it fill me with joy?

Am I exhausted and full of dread even contemplating it?

Does my heart’s yearning live in here, somehow, in some way?

I learned through those years of cancer and disability that people didn’t come see me for my objectivity, my neutrality, or my brilliant reasoning. They came to see me to help them locate and live in right relationship to their own emotional lives - I could do that effectively enough via my Sherlockian powers of deduction or I could do that by simply refusing to abandon my own heart.

My heart was the only thing that could tell me what was worth spending my scarce energies on, what road I would have the fortitude and endurance to travel down. When I fell into fatigue after engaging in an activity that seemed smart or merely dutiful the exhaustion felt hollow, bitter, pointless. When I spent myself on what my heart called for, the depletion carried a kind of satisfaction and gentle permission to rest deeply.

When chemo stopped and over the next year I felt much of my brain come flooding back to me (I’m probably around eighty-five to ninety percent of my old capacities) I felt great gratitude for I had missed it dearly. I welcomed it back without the reverence or idealization I had offered it before. It wasn’t my life-line, or certainly not my only or a perfectly reliable one. It had failed me, and led me to fail many other people as all its unsustainable promises shattered. Maybe it had even led me into the clutches of illness.

I trust my old achy bones now. I trust the hurt. I trust the exhaustion and the dread. I’ve learned to love all the ways my body and soul speak to me through my heart - even the uncomfortable signals. Through its aches and pains and sparkles, my old bruised heart leads me toward endeavors that are far more consistent, generative, sustainable, richer, more flexible - for myself and others.