You Are Not the Splinter

You Are Not the Splinter

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

Maya Angelou

A wrong move with some extra pressure on top, and I got a fissured rib. Now, per se that is nothing dangerous, but it is quite painful and the only remedy is to R.E.S.T. So for me it was a double “misery”: every movement hurt, and I was forced to stay put at home. 

The biggest challenge in such a situation are neither the physical pain nor the constraint not to move, but not to be reduced by the situation. I didn’t want to feel pity for myself or whine about it: "The fissured rib is not all that I am!". 

Instead I grabbed the occasion to meditate more often, to read and write for hours, to start up a new knitting project and prepare my meals with extra love and care. The best thing about these immobile days was that I really noticed their positive effect on my rib. :-)

As Mark Nepo puts it in his Book of Awakening: “When feeling miserable we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”