I consider it a positive trait to be comfortable in many different situations, and it’s something that I have always worked on in myself.  When I feel awkward or uncomfortable I try to realize that (unless the situation is physically dangerous) these feelings arise from me and are not the product of the actual place.  The squirmy sensation generally comes from a lack of real understanding about my surroundings.   “A lack of real understanding” is a bit vague so I will give an example.  If I were in a meat packing plant I would feel uncomfortable.  I would be surrounded by death and blood and would think that it was gross, but the butchers who work at that plant would not be affected by it at all because the butchers are intimately familiar with the process.  Some people call this being desensitized but I think of it as the complete opposite, all of their senses are working perfectly; they just understand what is going on and are no longer put off by it, due to their understanding.  This is a bit of a philosophical rant, but it relates to the story at hand.

Last night I spent the night sleeping on a hard linoleum floor in the stroke ward of a hospital.  Let me be clear in that I haven’t had a stroke and as far as I know that isn’t the particular problem going on with my friend either, but it is the neurological area of the hospital to which he has been assigned.  To give his wife and family a break I ran watch last night in a place that I can easily say made me uncomfortable before I was sensitized to it.

The room that we were in was a shared room, and the other half of it was filled with a young Asian man who seems to have had some type of terrible stroke.  He is almost completely unresponsive to the world except for the occasional long eerie groan.  There are no cots and only very uncomfortable straight back chairs for visitors so my options for sleep were pretty limited. I chose the floor, where at least I could stretch myself out a bit (I’m not a small guy).  As the night wore on, there were nurses and orderlies coming in and out every hour to do room checks and their approaching steps would wake me up from any small respite of sleep that I could snatch.  But the main culprit in the uneasy feeling was the deep resonating depression of a stroke ward.  It is a long hallway filled with people have recently had their lives smashed by a horrible affliction.  There are tears constantly around the waiting rooms and outside of half open doors.  There are stern faced nurses who have seen it all.  There are half drooped people slumping through the halls with a family member and a rolling I.V. stand.  It had me unnerved at first.

After I realized that I was actually emotionally uncomfortable I started to look around with deeper eyes at my surroundings.  Those half drooped patients were striving to recover and bring back their life.  Those nurses were steely eyed and stern faced because they were working as hard as they could to help heal those who had hope and to give hope to those who did not.  Those tears were from the hurt that can only come from really loving someone, these people were not alone and unloved.  The stroke ward of that hospital was not a scary place, it was a place of peace and I was just a cog in that turning wheel by sleeping on that floor and trying to give some of that peace to my friends.  Once I realized that, despite the physical discomfort I was out like a light.

This is a video that I stumbled across… it is a very beautiful and eloquent way of saying something that I have felt for a long time… the animation is OK, but the point is fantastic.

Music and Life – Alan Watts