Denial. Part Deux.

So, all things considered, denial served me quite well last weekend in getting through the ramp up to Megan moving. Of course, as I hugged her good bye at the security line, we both burst into tears. I cried all the way home and throughout the day. I could cry right now if I thought about her absence too much.

With the comments I received on denial, I thought more about denial this week. Like anything, there are definitely abuses of denial (proverbial ostrich with his head buried in the ground), but denial also serves an incredible purpose. Unlike animals, we have the great gift of the knowledge of mortality (our lives, things in our lives) and pain. We can experience pleasure and joy with the golden lens of denial. We also have an ability to split our thinking, an ability to find pleasure and joy even in the midst of pain and death.

I have spent three days at home with sick children - both had colds. Dear Harper got a brief stomach virus, and poor Asher came down with a nasty case of croup. So it has been three days of tending to poorly feeling children and dealing with the special circumstances of illness (whining, incomprehension of not being able to eat when hungry, many tears, refusal of medicine, both children wanting to be held - incidentally, I do not know how a mother of more than two children does it! - all day long, sore arms and sore wrists from carrying children around, little sleep and worry), which combined with all the other life events has brought on a feeling of utter chaos. Yet, as I drove to the office this morning for a much needed break, I thought about the Balinese medicine man in Eat, Pray, Love and his instruction to meditate with a smile, even to smile in your liver. And I could somewhat, smile even in my liver while my shoulders felt tired from carrying around this week.

I have recently been thinking about the divine and how we connect to the divine. Pascal writes about how man is in some way part divine and part human - that some part of us is indeed in the image of God, that close to the divine. I have been ruminating on the Yogic idea of the divine in us. I was impressed while studying Euclid and Plato in college that there is some part of us that knows of divine things - perfect circles, true love, perfect parents, parallel lines - of which we have no physical experience. Only an ideal. Denial, then, seems like knowledge of the divine (and a glimpse of heaven), connection with an ideal that things should not be the way they are - friends and family should not be far away, we should not die, there should be no pain. We should always be smiling in our liver.