I’ve had a sinus infection for a little while now. Of course I have.

I say that because certain tell-tale signs over the last many weeks have been duly ignored as I’ve done my damndest to work around the blockage in my right nostril and slight pressure between my eyebrows. And while the symptoms came and went, disappeared even to the point where I was proud to think, I licked this thing, well, no, my sinusial (is that a word. No, actually, but this is) system let me know otherwise and kicked in with a vengeance a couple of days ago. That’s when it became clear I’d need to have a pow-wow with my teleDoc. So I did that and am now on a course of antibiotics (gak).

Anyhoo, the point is, I often think I’m someone who pays attention to what is happening inside of me. Letting the feelings in and sitting with them. The operative word in that first sentence is think. I aspire to be that person for sure. I have my eye on it. I intend to step in and look around, then stay for a bit and take in the feelings without fleeing. But more often than not, I enter, think, yes, stay here, then follow a shiny object somewhere else. My meditation has definitely taken this turn. I’m not unaware of that. My tendency for avoidance and a leaning toward putting things off when it comes to emotional repair and recognition has come into sharp relief in the last month+.

I’d agreed to some extracurricular work projects that clanged into each other as one workday ended and the other project’s hours would begin. It served as a great—in the large-in-number sense rather than the oh-joy way—distraction. And I was exhausted, occasionally distraught, and generally made dismal by the overlap even as the projects themselves were filled with cool moments, even as my dad lay dying and my mind worked to keep it all together. Well, sure, I thought, I can grieve while also meeting these and various deadlines, which, by the way, I set for myself given the folx in charge were beyond kind in offering me as much time off as I needed. Time I was too scared to take…in an emotional rather than financial sense.

Coming out the other end of those many projects, there I was with large swathes of time in which to notice some things: a blocked right nostril, that was causing fuzziness of the head and no availability to really taste food (this last bit is interesting to note given my dad complained of a lack in the taste bud area for the last few years, which frustrated him to no end and I know exactly why.) And also that my heart, the feeling function part, had softened so that seeing a little girl with large, red-framed glasses banded to her tiny head as she jumped solo into the YMCA pool made me cry. The power of these things stopped me in my tracks while also taking me by surprise. The humbling of what it is to be human. At some point, my inner self got tired of waiting for me to pay attention and just decided to drop me to my proverbial knees.

I know it happens like that. The fact that you can run, or at least walk very quickly, out in front of life’s pesky, painful, and emotional experiences but yet find yourself, maybe while waiting at a proverbial light at a busy intersection or some such, caught up with, tapped on the shoulder, and told that you dropped something a few life-miles back and here, I carried it all this way to give you, is usually inevitable. That’s happened to me a few times in life, and more often than not I’ll jump the light and run across the street, dodge a few truth trucks while muttering, hold on, if you can just carry it for a little longer, then I’ll deal with it, let me just get through this busy bit. It’s not that I haven’t ached for the slow-down, the turning toward and into myself to become a wiser human. But, truth be, I’ve also been a little afraid of the experience.

Kind of like when I was in college and one of my roommates told me he could will himself into a certain state of consciousness where he’d be hovering above his body and could look down and see himself on the bed. For some reason, at the time, that seemed super cool and I wanted to be able to do that too. So yes, we were probably stoned when we talked about it. Yet still, I’d go to bed and really concentrate on making this out-of-body thing happen. But to be honest, I also remember being terrified of it happening. Because then what? What if I managed it and couldn’t get back in? Ended up being stranded out there. Apparently, there was some kind of golden thread connecting you/your soul/etc. to your physical self but I worried that puppy could snap at any time. I mean, a thread is thin. Mine might have been a bit worn down. And golden, would that make the thread stronger somehow? I never really felt I had all the information so in the end, while it might have been a great party conversation, I never did fully commit to achieving it.

Now, 40-odd years on, while I’m no closer to levitating out of my body, I am closer to stepping inside it. I understand more how the protective mechanisms I used when I was young kept me safe and that I don’t need to rely on them the same way anymore. Take the tools I’ve used to try and fix everything and everyone outside of me and begin to tinker around with the stuff inside. Boy, I can think of about a million other things to do instead: laundry and the cleaning of cat boxes come to mind. Yet to be actively available for some inner work means at least standing on the porch and finding the door. Staying put as I try to breathe into my right nostril while watching a very brave little girl learn to swim with glasses on.