195 Life As A Hospital Room
I know it’s instinctive to be around similar folks. ‘Birds-of-a-feather’ and all that stuff. But we hardly learn when we let that be the norm.
A dear friend broke her hip and I’m spending several hours each day with her as she recuperates. After the operation, she was sent to the maternity ward, as it had a few empty beds. (About a fourth of the beds there were filled by seniors from Emergency.) It was a remarkable day for me.
When I arrived about eight, the first thing I heard was mewing sounds of a baby born the night before. By the time I left, that same infant’s voice had tripled in strength, sounding like a real baby. All day, all around me were sights, sounds and smells of new life. People coming and going with smiles of celebration and hope. Many ethnic groups and languages, all sharing the common joy of new life.
Yet, there was my friend, approaching the possible end of her life. And amongst it all, the many wonderful staff, just trying their best to make everyone well and happy, dealing with new life and impending crisis at the same time, realizing that both are natural, to be given their due attention.
Never before had I been in a situation that imposed so clearly, the two ‘book-ends’ of life. I had been at many births and many deaths, but not together. What a learning for me. How can we humans be so stupid to not recognize that our very birthing and dying should bind us together, that nothing is worth our strife and killing? We’re literally all in the same birthing-dying room. It’s called Earth. The best we can do, the ONLY smart thing we can do is to learn to serve each other in this short time and space we have together. All other enterprise is a waste. Every inclination that sets us apart, is counter to our very existence and to our growth as humans. Every religious doctrine, nationalistic slogan or tradition that divides us by making us ‘special’ or ‘different’ is one more blow against our true selves and is detrimental to our future.
We humans developed in small tribes where all ages were together, learning and passing on the wisdoms that are in every stage of our existence. The youth have things to teach. As do adults and, of course, our elders. As we have become ‘civilized’, we are more stratified and apart. Now, with our technology, each generation is even more alone, learning less from the others. Not a healthy situation. It will be difficult to not become more stupid, just when we need even more collective wisdom, due to the challenges humanity is facing. Will we try to make more shared ‘hospital-room’ situations happen? It will take planning in our automatically segregated society. Let’s try. Anthony, realizing anew that I’ve got so much to learn
