FINAL

“If you want to identify me ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” – Thomas Merton to the British police questioning him. 

There are fewer things more stimulating or inspiring for me than my gentle disagreements with my friend Eve Marko, who is a Zen teacher and Master, and whom I love.

We see the world in much the same way, yet we see the world differently. That does not divide us or bring us apart; it unites us and brings us closer, the way dialogue and disagreement should.

I have great respect for Eve. I see her as more learned and thoughtful that I am, there are not many Zen masters around,  but she graces me by reading my blog and compliments me by engaging me in dialogue when we see things differently.

There is no venom, no judgment, no hostility of the kind that has poisoned our public spaces, the Internet,  the American discourse, and our politics.

I think she and I both respect and learn from difference, rather than rage and argue, and that is precious to both of us and increasingly rare in our divided culture.

We have a sort of standing joke, but it’s not a joke. Eve always asks me when we talk, “how is your health?”  and I always twitch a bit and respond by saying, “don’t ask me about my health, ask me how I am living my life.”

She thought about this, as Eve does (she has a beautiful website, evemarko.com), and wrote this reply, which I’ll reprint here in its entirety:

“Hi Jon, Your post on walking in the woods was gorgeous. I was going to email you about something else. I looked last night at my sent emails and saw the one I sent you in response to your email asking if I ask young people about their health as much as I do older folks. I said yes if they’ve been sick. I realized right then that I’d soft-pedaled it. The truth is, Jon, I ask everyone about their health (“How are you doing physically?) regardless if they’re sick or not, and certainly regardless of their age. I ask it of my students if I haven’t seen them in a while (most are younger than me), I ask it of my nephews and nieces, certainly of my siblings who are younger than me. The reason is that I learned a while ago how connected it all is, the mind, the body, the brain. Illness or chronic pain disturbs the psyche; it affects so much of our mental and emotional capacities. What I didn’t learn before I learned big-time after my husband had his stroke. He was a man with a great will and would rarely talk about physical ailments to people, but the stroke knocked all that out of him.

I certainly respect people who want to keep all that to themselves and, often with a force of will and determination, continue to renew their lives. But there’s something about using the will in that way that feels macho to me. It has to go hand in hand with a quality of surrender because I do believe that’s what we’re asked to do as we age. There’s a lot more to say about this that I’d rather do in person rather than via email, but your post about that walk had something of that gentleness with the self that I mean. Love, Eve.”

I read the Merton quote at the top of this post some years ago, when I spent a year with his books and journals and wrote my book Running To The Mountain. It made a deep impression one, inspiring my resistance to being asked about my health once I began to get older.

Eve says she asks everyone how their health is, but the only people who ever ask me about it are older, and it strikes me as a kind of old talk, a way of focusing older people on their health and medicines and ailments rather than on their lives. As I’ve written, I think old talk is not often about being honest, it’s about feeling old.

To me, getting older is not primarily about my health, and I have good reasons to think about health, I have two chronic diseases, diabetes, and heart disease.

I understand as best I can the trauma of her husband’s stroke and its debilitating effect, and I am not the least bit macho or in denial about what might occur to me, I see it almost every day at the Mansion assisted care facility, where I volunteer.

Even my doctor says I am a feminized man (when I was a kid, they called it a “girlie-man,” and I am tickled to be called macho in any context. My father would be proud of me.

I think it’s because Eve is referencing her husband Bernie, a man of strong and famous will that it makes me uneasy.

I don’t need to think or another illness or death every time I speak with an older person. Young people never ask me that question, and I find it dull and narcissistic to talk about my doctor’s visits and the cost of my medicine and the problems with health care today.

Other people’s fears and sorrows go right through me, I have to admit that.

Health talk just seems gloomy to me, and it has come to define so many of the older people I meet. I can hardly bear to talk to people my age. Their talk about health is rarely hopeful or uplifting.

Eve is not coming from that place.

To be honest, health talk dominated every dinner table conversation of every family gathering I was dragged to when I was a child, which was often. The conversation rarely flowed past suffering and loss. That might have planted the seed of my sensitivity to the subject.

I know where I am, and I know where I am going.

I like Eve’s idea about how holistic and connected we all are in our mind and body. But I am open about my health. When I had Open-Heart Surgery, I immediately starting writing a Recovery Journal that lasted for months. My poor readers were subjected to lots of details.

Open Heart Surgery is a powerful exercise in surrender, as I imagine having a stroke is also.

If anybody wanted to know about my health during that time, they got quite a full dose. I write about my visits to the doctor, take photos of them, and share test results and post pictures of my retina during and after laser surgery.

And after the surgery, and for many months, nobody asked me about anything but my health. I didn’t like it. What I needed was to move past it and go forward. I didn’t need to talk about it all of the time. It never defined me, it doesn’t now.

In my mind, there are two ways to look at it, as there are to look at anything.

Eve believes talking about one’s health is healthy, I tend to think it is often unhealthy. In our country, health is not just a spiritual issue, but a fiercely divisive political and social question.

But I’m with Merton on the question of identity.

My health at the moment is not central to me, or a driving force in my life. I don’t mean this callously, but almost everyone I know has lost a friend or family member to illness, accident, or death.

I care for Eve and about her health, but it is not the first thing I want to know about her or from here when we speak. Like Merton, I want to know how Eve is living, and what she is living for, and what, if anything, is keeping her from living fully for the thing she wants to live for.

That is precisely why I love the Merton quote so much, that is precisely what I wish to know about the people I care about. I understand that other people are different.

If they wish to talk to me about their health, I’m happy to hear it, but it is not as central to me at this point as my life.

That’s why I balk at my health being a greeting, rather than a part of my life.