I came across this song while browsing http://garr.posterous.com/if-life-is-really-as-short-as-they-say-then-w
Awesome post, awesome song, I recommend you check it out.
So I decided to try to answer 2 out of three questions posed in this song.
What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
How can a man like me remain in the light?
And I'm going to let you guys answer the last one.
If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?
Can there really be an answer to such questions? Who knows such things, but life is all about failing forward and if the choice is
- Not trying and failing or
- Trying and maybe succeeding
Then I say we give it a whirl.
Q. What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
A. Re-frame it.
Once I was sitting next to a teacher, much like the one in this song, and he told me about his "wellness knee".
When he was a young man, he severely injured his knee in a car accident and had to get several operations just to be able to walk again. His knee was shattered and it took months of recovery just to be able to walk again. He did recover, but never fully. His knee was never at 100% again.
Now that he was a man of certain age, his bad knee was a barometer of sorts. He called it his wellness knee. If he was eating right, getting enough sleep, exercising, meditating, and generally speaking taking good care of himself, his knee would be fine. If however, he was slacking-off in one of these areas, his knee would start to hurt. His bad knee was an indicator of how well he was living. It was his wellness knee.
I thought that was a brilliant way to re-frame a negative and turn it into a positive.
Can this method be used to glue the pieces of a broken heart back together? I think so.
Whenever it happened to me, I wrote a song about it. My broken heart became a treasure trove of inspiration. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the artist who wrote this song started in a similar predicament.
There are 3 occasions that I remember having a non-romantic pain from a broken heart. Those may not be as intense and can serve as a training ground of sorts. The three times I remember was when Freddie Mercury died, the second when Frank Zappa died and third and very recent when Daddy (Cesar Millan’s pit bull) died.
I remember having a distinct case of a slightly bruised, cracking at the seams, damn-near broken heart. In these instances I always had a tendency to remove myself from the feelings and observe them at a distance. Later, I’ve learned that in Buddhism, this is known as Observer/Observed. A kind of out-of-body experience that with little bit of practice, anyone can use to take them selves out of a situation (even if you are in the middle of it) and take on a bird’s eye view.
It doesn’t matter if you are observing your feelings and noticing how the pain makes you feel alive; or if you are observing a business meeting and noticing the entire picture, the details, taking in everyone’s posture, the mood, etc.
Final word on reframing. Humans define themselves though suffering, it’s been said.
If you can take something bad and turn it into a wellness knee, then you know what to do with a broken heart.
Q. How can a man like me remain in the light?
A. Its not the darkness, it’s the opportunity.
I struggled with this one, as I imagine many of us do. You see, when I was a young man living in Bosnia, Serbian armies had invaded my country. I’ve lost my father in that war, many of my close friends had perished, and I became a refugee living in tenement camps until eventually I landed in the good ol’ US of A. For many years, I’ve carried resentment and pain towards Serbs.
Until one day I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak about a young boy who was forced to flee his land narrowly escaping his prosecutors who did their best to track him down and kill him, for this young boy was the spiritual leader of a nation. That boy of course, was Dalai Lama himself.
At that time, Dalai Lama was forced to take on the burden of a displaced and destroyed nation, assume both spiritual and political leadership while in exile, all the while practicing love, compassion and understanding.
So how do you show compassion to your persecutors? This is what he said and I paraphrase.
I realized, he said, that Chinese were a challenge and an obstacle I needed to deal with, but I didn’t feel resentment, hatred nor need for revenge. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity to practice forgiveness.
An opportunity to practice forgiveness.
I kinda took on faith that it was the right thing to do and it turned out that it was. The act of forgiveness is ultimately self-serving because it takes the burden away from us. The burden that we would otherwise take with us in all future situations.
Your turn.
Q. If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?
