When Things Fall Apart

Sometime during the last year my friend Ana gave me a book When Things Fall Apart. I was in St. Martin and apparently wasn’t doing as well as I thought. I was walking alone from Le Boutique when she stopped her dirty black SUV in front of me. Jumping out, she hugged me, then scolded me for taking care of everybody except myself and gave me the book. Then she jumped back in and with tears in her eyes and drove on to her work giving massages.

After watching her drive away, I stared at the book written by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun. Alice Walker endorsed it and I love Alice Walker’s stuff so I figured that it couldn’t be too bad. It took me forever to read it because I was in a pretty rotten place emotionally in dark contrast to the Caribbean paradise I was strolling through.

Pema says that most of us spend our lives trying to escape suffering when it is simply a part of life. It is better if we would approach our painful situations with friendly curiosity. There, in the middle of our chaos and groundlessness we discover that truth and love are indestructible.

“How very Buddhist,” I thought to myself. “Nothing is real.”

I threw it in my bag and half a year later pulled it out and started it.

The first time that things fell apart for me was when I snuck out of the house to go dancing and was run over by four college kids their way to Florida. At 14 I had a shattered leg, lying in traction in a hospital bed, discovering what a bedpan is. My world had completely fallen apart.

Then in college I discovered birth control … or what it isn’t. All of my friends went mountain climbing while I changed diapers.

At the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel I had my first taste of fame and discovered temptation, succumbed to it and immediately was thrown out by the Christ loving Baptists.

A couple of years ago I came home from an out of town work retreat, very excited only to be told that I’m no longer loved in “that way” and then I was left alone.

A few months later I woke up with nothing else inside of me to give. The work that I’d done for three decades had taken it all. There was nothing else, including anything for me.


It’s right after this that Ana gave me the book.

So that’s my list of when things fell apart in my life. Sure there were other time when things went wrong or the day was really bad, but those were aberrations to mostly good times, success, and happiness.

But there have been five occasions when everything about who I am as person, how I lived my life and the future that I’d planned … fell completely apart.
And I was left … groundless.

It makes me think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He’s sweating prayers to God, “I don’t want to drink from cup” but God pours it down his unwilling throat anyway. I didn’t want any of these things to happen but they did.

And they all contributed to who I am now. In the past, I was merely different incarnations of who I am today.

How very Buddhist!

I told a friend who I love recently, “Just wait, things will present themselves to you in their time.” And they have.

Talk about Buddhist! Or God’s will or timing or whatever you want to call it. Most things happen when they’re supposed to. But Pema’s got that part right, the $64,000 question is what do we do when the moments present themselves? Do we run and hide? We ignore them? We pretend that we don’t have choices to make? We withdraw and hide like little children?

Or … we fight like hell to accept what is.

Over the past few years, I’m done a lot of fighting. It grew weary but I’m finally done. I’m just accepting now. It is what it is. I am who I am. And I’m ok with it. Finally!

How very Buddhist!