To Be Ordinary Is Very Special

We are all special.

A few days before Christmas, I had an attack of TMJ.  I forget what those letters stand for (look it up, if you must) but what it means is that I slept with my jaw clenched and woke up in severe pain on the right side of my face.  My usual techniques for dealing with pain (something that I don't often experience) didn't work.  Instead of scurrying about my business, I wanted to curl up and weep with the hopelessness of it all.  And I would have except that my face hurt too much.

I think it was the fact that I sent an angry text to my son from bed at 3 AM reading, "You MUST do ALL the dishes and clean up the kitchen!!!" that put me over the edge.  Since returning from Italy, he has taken to making himself pasta in the small hours of the morning and leaving the kitchen a mess, which I then discover only a couple of hours later.  This does not make me happy.  In fact, it causes me to send angry texts from bed and then clench my jaw so tightly that I spend the next week downing ibuprofen like they are peanuts.

But the good news is that my jaw is softening up.  The pain is under control and lessening each day.  I should be able to enter Rohatsu sesshin without the added thrill of severe facial pain in the mix.  But the whole experience was a bit of a wake-up call.  I didn't even know that I had reached my stressed out tipping point.  When I finally did some accounting for myself, the list of things that were worthy of jaw clenching was actually pretty high.  As someone who spends a ton of time bearing witness to my thoughts and actions, it is almost embarrassing that I was so unaware of what was really going on.  But there you go!

So....my wish and hope for you - and for myself - in the coming new year is that you - and me - allow ourselves enough space and time to really know what is enough.  And then allow it to Be Enough.  Because we are enough!

See?