Instant Messengers

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have

entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2

One of the things thrown off while my body rids itself of all the nasty chemicals it has absorbed over the past few months has been my sleep cycle. Post surgery, I slept like a baby; aided, no doubt, by the pain meds and my body's need to repair itself. During active treatment, sleep came rather easily from sheer exhaustion of what my body was going through. These days, however, I often find myself tossing and turning as mind and body try to readjust to "normal" life.

Being a firm believer in the notion that we cannot make sleep happen, we can only let go of wakefulness, I try not to struggle with these episodes. So, when wakefulness is stuck to me like Velcro, I will usually get out of bed and move into another room and let my mind wander as it will, knowing that it will eventually tire of itself. On one particular night, as I lay staring out our living room windows, the old Buddhist adage "When the student is ready the master will appear" came into my head. The idea is that when the time is right, not before, not after, our teacher, guide, guru, etc. will show up to lead us toward a higher level of consciousness. In the West, we are wired to think of this as always being a person whose wisdom will lead us toward everlasting life. In the East, it is taught that the guru can take any form and his, her, or its sole responsibility is to show us the path back toward our true self, our "inner guru."

As I lay there, legs still feeling like they were ready to run a marathon, mind already in full sprint mode, I thought, "Who is more ready than me, after everything I have been through? Where is my guru? Who is going to lead me out of this darkness? When is the master going to arrive? Why did I eat so many chicken wings? Did I take the garbage out? Which dog is licking my toes?” (My thinking is seldom linear during these moments.)

Suddenly, a question came to mind and it was like a light went on in my head. Or, maybe it was the motion spotlights outside illuminating the nightly visiting deer family hoping to munch on our garden’s latest offering. Whatever the case, I found myself wondering if it was possible that cancer itself was my teacher. Was it possible that while searching for a master, in the guise of a monkish figure come to Zen me out with his quirky insights, I had missed the obvious?

Instantly, the answer came with an equal flash. Nothing in my life has pushed me more toward present moment awareness, what the great masters have referred to as mindfulness, satori, moksha, or the kingdom of heaven, than thoughts about cancer. The moment I was diagnosed I began to shift from reading, thinking, and writing about mindfulness to actively engaging in its practices on a daily basis. Every anxious thought about what might happen next has been an alarm meant to wake me out of the dream of time, of past and future. Cancer has been there since the start like the Zen master’s board that he uses to slap the supposedly meditating student back into the here and now. (They actually do this; with love, of course.)

By no means am I suggesting that as I lay there that night I had become the Buddha--the awakened one. Heck, I didn’t even get a good night’s sleep, so I was the awake one. I did, however, gain a different perspective on my diagnosis and while I didn’t make friends with it, I did find some respect for what it has brought me in a positive sense. Its message seems clear; if we allow our greatest challenges to do their work, through acceptance not resistance, we just might find that the strangers who show up at our door are truly angels, literally “messengers,” in the ancient Greek text, who we mistook for intruders. The trick is that we have to be present in order to open the door when they knock.