Learn From It

Three is my favorite number. It's the most magical number, I feel, because it's more than this-or-that, black-or-white. It's just more.

Three forms a tripod, a steady base for a seat, or any kind of support. Tripods are everywhere, anywhere.

Some people think that truth forms a steady base, that certain truths are Truths, immobile, fixed, stuck. I'm not one of those people. I think that truth is a construct and a contract, agreement and articulacy.

Truth sits atop a tripod. The legs that form the tripod are Desire, Data and Doubt. Desire establishes intent and pace. Data provides answers. Doubt frames the questions.

Truth doesn't exist with out questions. Truth is rarely an answer. Truth is what you make it and where you find it.

Desire, Data and Doubt: the three D's of truth.

Where am I going with this? Well, I suppose that of the three, Doubt is the one that has been lynchpinning my day-to-days. Such as they are.

When dramatics devolve into histrionics, I am a Broken Man. It's just three ribs and a contused spleen—and, ok, maybe a contused lung as well—but I do not feel physically whole. There's literally a hole in my side. When I run my hands down my flanks there is asymmetry. One rib is still “floating”, as they say and I sympathize with it.

I am living with a Broken Man, one whose breaks are of a different sort. His disconnects aren't physical and, unfortunately, aren't as acute as mine, nor anywhere as easily healed. His Brokenness intrudes on mine. My brokenness brings him down.

In these times I am an old gray man. Oh, not the remaining hair—that's been gray for a while. I mean when I look in the mirror, in convalescence, I see a gray man. Gray skin, eyes that seem less blue and more gray. Maybe the mirror has a black-and-white filter. Maybe if I look more closely I can cast myself in sepia instead, something warm in these colder times. Maybe.

I always walk with the Desire to know myself and understand the world around me. The scientist and observer in me collect Data through the senses in ways and at speeds that sometimes frighten me.

But Doubt? There is doubt, but not Doubt, in me all of the time. Doubt is the anti-religion because it is its own One and Only Commandment: Thou Shalt Question!

In better days I'm just injured and not broken. In better days, my lower-case doubts move and shift and adapt and dodge, framing my day into something arable, abidable, understandable.

But these have not been better days, and today I've discovered why: Doubt. Not that my doubts have grown to Doubt, but rather that my doubting has fallen by the wayside and I have had no frame for what's been going on and thus it has overwhelmed. It's everywhere when there's no frame to provide context and scale.

Today I followed up my hospital care by going to my primary care physician, the glorious Lisa Capaldini. I spoke to her about the broken and the gray, about the nerve pain in my shoulder. She said my chest-tube incision was “beautiful”.

I told her I compared my pain to her now somewhat famous incident/injury. She had been working herself like crazy and was near exhaustion. She was at a private fundraiser in a private home. She walked through a glass door and managed to sever her femoral artery, femoral vein and femoral nerve. She arrived at the hospital with no vital signs. They “topped her off” with a couple of pints of blood and she just seemed to start up again.

What is a low-speed Vespa accident and three fractured ribs compared to that, I asked her? “But I didn't feel any of it,” she said. “I have no idea how much pain you must be in.”

I demurred, and blushed. And didn't quite know what to do with myself.

She spoke up: “You know what the worst pain I experienced was? I was menstruating at the time. Even though my body was so torn, I was still ovulating. And how Catholic is that?”

I laughed. Ribs hurt like a fucker. And in that moment, better days began.

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