Coda
Floating in the Bardo
The first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
— Mary Oliver, ‘Low Tide’
IN THE MANY MONTHS I spent ill and recovering from surgeries, an image kept recurring in my mind: a woman, submerged, under the sea. Not horizontal but vertical, limbs unmoving, face turned up to the blurred, distant sun.
The sense of being alive but suspended has long encapsulated for me a sense of the quiet sacred, of a kind of patient waiting, of a dark peace in the liminal stretch between the ocean surface and the depths. Where you are alone, but not afraid.
There, you reach a point of stillness.
I felt like this when I was first pregnant. I would often duck under the water out past the breaking waves and just stay there, floating. But it wasn’t until I was listening to free diver Michael Adams on the radio that I began to understand why I found comfort there. It was like what Tibetans call the Bardo — the transitional state between birth and rebirth.
The deeper you go, Adams told ABC radio host Richard Fidler, the more you discard: ‘The trivia of everyday life falls away. All of the conventional things we waste our time on fall away and I think this is what it is for me, the sense that you are just one tiny speck amongst all these other living things on the planet . . . It’s very humbling. We put humans on top of the pyramid, we’re the boss — [but] down there you’re not the boss.’ It’s the smallness of awe: floating under the surface you compress yourself, you are quiet, tiny in an immense body of water: ‘It unstitches you in various kinds of ways,’ Adams said.
He went on to reference Simone Weil, who talked about recognising the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment and he described how ‘all of us as living things are subject to so much risk and danger on a daily basis. We . . . distance ourselves from that . . . but for most things on the planet life is uncertain and for humans too. And that’s what comes into me. That sense of fragility. And it’s not frightening, which is the really interesting thing.’
Adams does not view time in the depths as similar to the time between life and death, but the time between life and rebirth. Some Buddhist scholars argue this is part of every moment of existence: every single moment lies between the past and the future.
This is how it feels when you are suspended in the ocean, surrounded by shafts of speckled light reaching down from the surface. The tiny sea creatures lit by these slanted golden columns look like flecks of dust in library light, floating between bookshelves, or fine particles in cathedral light, dancing above the pews.
IN HER BRILLIANT NETFLIX SHOW Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby spoke about being a lesbian whose favourite sound is that of a teacup sliding onto a saucer and who finds the rainbow flag a bit busy, of her contempt for the misogyny of Picasso, of being raped and assaulted and abused, and the shame instilled in a teenager growing up in a part of Tasmania where 70 per cent of people voted against making homosexuality legal. Stories like hers, she said, as she relived and retold her trauma nightly for months, need to be told. But she said she was done with comedy, done with the kind of self-deprecation that was rooted not in humility but humiliation. The roar of appreciation for her work crescendoed precisely at the moment when she was going to make her exit; the critics spoke in consensus: her rage, resolve and candour ‘broke comedy’, broke conventions.
Illness breaks bones and thieves organs, but you can rebuild. Staring down death alters you permanently. One of the ways it changed me is that I am now severely impatient with First World problems, with the recurrent complaints of the favoured and fortunate, and with the smugness of Instagram posts where people congratulate themselves on their lives and partners and their own faces, rather than looking around them. People complain of such small and stupid things. (One of my American friends assured me that being preoccupied with trivia was a sign of a return to health and to some extent this is true: I craved lightness and ridiculousness when I clambered back from the underworld of the ill.)
Perspective is a crucial thing. As American author Robert Fulghum wrote, ‘If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire — then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy . . . A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same kind of lump. One should learn the difference.’ It’s true: we need to resist complaining about experiencing inconvenience. That is what it means to live.
SOMETIMES, WHEN INFECTED, WOUNDS can become luminescent. In 1862, during the American Civil War, observers noted that the wounds of some injured soldiers at the Battle of Shiloh began to glow; these wounds healed faster than others. Likewise, in World War I, according to journalist James Byrne, many soldiers had ‘wounds that glowed in the dark. Not only that, but their fluorescing tissues appeared to heal more cleanly and more quickly than the unilluminated wounds of their counterparts.’ It seems this effect was caused by a soil-dwelling luminescent bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens. But, ‘naturally, the afflicted soldiers had no idea that the glow was caused by a beneficial bacterial infection and instead interpreted it as the gift of survival from God, handed to them by angels’. Hence the name for the phenomenon: ‘Angel’s Glow’.
WE ARE ALL VULNERABLE. You realise this when you can no longer pretend you are immortal. Illness can be as random and shocking as lightning. After I wrote a column on cancer for The New York Times, I received a call from a man called Jamie Dimon in Manhattan. I was only vaguely aware of him, somewhat embarrassingly, but he wanted to talk about my piece, about the idea of living deliberately. The striking CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase, who had been listed as one of the world’s 100 most influential people several times by Time magazine, told me he had survived throat cancer, and something in my article had struck a chord. He had decided to live deliberately, to focus on family, and cut out superfluous meetings. He was kind, encouraging and thoughtful. He told me to look him up when I was next in New York.
That Christmas, I found myself running late to see him, trying to stay calm in a midtown traffic jam. The cab dropped me on the wrong side of the road and I had to scramble through some bushes in the middle of Park Avenue to get to his offices. When I arrived at JPMorgan Chase, there was a row of security guards with outstretched hands. And there it sank in that Dimon was an emperor of the financial world, with two office blocks filled with New York employees, and an entire floor for his personal staff. We sat in the little room behind his office, which was crammed with photos of his family, and spoke about everything that mattered. His eyes welled up when he spoke about telling his daughters he had cancer.
So there we were, a New York billionaire businessman with polished shoes and a heavily mortgaged Australian writer with twigs still stuck in her hair from crawling through the bushes outside, nodding at each other, understanding entirely what it meant to have your world stripped bare of anything but love and a thirst to survive.
A few months later, when I was back in New York, I emailed him and told him my cancer had recurred. He wrote back quickly, telling me to come to his office so he could give me a hug. Now I see him every time I am in town.
I WROTE THIS BOOK in the hope that it might be a salve for the weary, as well as a reminder of the mental rafts we can build to keep ourselves afloat, the scraps of beauty that should comfort us, the practices that might sustain us, especially in times of grief, illness, pain and darkness. I understand, though, that stillness, kindness, the sea and ancient trees can hardly be a universal panacea for all the suffering on this planet.