We live in an exhausting world
Life is an invitation to revive what has fallen asleep in us.
My optometrist called me to the first exam room, in which I opted, as I do every year, to participate in the full retina scan. Surprised to see him and not his medical assistant instead, I asked, “Are you by yourself today?”
His shoulders slumped, and he sighed, then pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, hesitating. “I’m about 40% short-staffed right now.” I pursed my lips, then slowly nodded and said, “That must be really hard. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you,” he said with a smile, sitting upright in his chair. “Not many of my patients say that to me.”
I shrugged, then said, “Well, that’s just how I am, I guess.”
“And how are you?” he continued. “I mean, really? How have things been going in your life since I last saw you?” He leaned forward, and for a moment, I thought I was in a therapist’s office rather than preparing for an eye exam. I sensed that this was an invitation for total transparency, or however much I wished to disclose in that moment.
I’m never sure how much to offer when a person genuinely asks me an open-ended question. Everyone is overwhelmed, I reminded myself, so don’t say too much. “Well, you know, life is pretty full with five kids,” I finally blurted.
He raised one brow. “That sounds fairly vague. Are you sure there isn’t more going on?”
This moment felt strange, awkward. Not bad, just unfamiliar. I could not recall the last time someone had actually approached me in a conversation with sincere and total interest regarding the hardship of my life. Not friends, not family, and certainly not a medical professional.
At this point, my optometrist gestured for me to press my forehead onto the first machine, securing my chin on the chin rest, then opening my right eye as wide as possible without blinking for several seconds.
“It’s overwhelming. Every day is hard. You know, pre-COVID, our family was already immersed in the health care system, and now it is even more difficult and cumbersome to navigate. I’m expected to do far more than what I am qualified, prepared, or able to do these days.”
He leaned back in his chair and motioned for me to place my face back on the machine, left eye this time. I did so. He spoke after a brief pause. The silence between us was not tense, but comfortable. Then, he spoke these words: “We live in an exhausting world.”
That was all he said. We live in an exhausting world. But I knew exactly what he meant.
He meant that the world no longer resembles what we once knew, and we are all grieving. Our hearts have all been broken, and most of us are living with fractures and fragments of what remains from a time in which we might have believed that people were mostly kind.
He meant that we no longer recognize who we are, or what has become of us. Three years ago, every human was teetering on the edge of breakdown or breakthrough, but we mostly broke down after the worldwide pandemic humbled us. We had to reckon with our limitations, confront the demons we’d been ignoring and all the shadows of our shame.
Now, in the aftermath, we are exhausted. We have been forced to work more with less appreciation. Nothing is certain or stable. Not that it was before, but we thought it was. We deluded ourselves into thinking we were safe somehow, that we could carry on in our busyness and “someday” get around to thinking about those existential, philosophical questions about life and death.
But someday is always today.
People often spoke about slowing down and reprioritizing their lives during the international shutdowns. I had learned this lesson nearly ten years before, when Sarah was born. So, while the rest of the world panicked, I did not. Instead, it felt natural for me to slip away for a quiet walk in our neighborhood park while everyone else holed up inside their homes, terrified of contracting The Plague.
But I had confronted the long loneliness of Questions With No Answers far before a pandemic knocked us off kilter. Sarah’s birth forced me to face both life and death, to ask myself if I wanted to both fully live and fully die. Because to do one is to necessarily do the other.
Because Sarah was born with a complex genetic diagnosis, I learned early on that she could be swept away by Death without warning. Like we all can.
The pandemic reminded us that we cannot control the trajectory of life and death, not totally, not really. We’d like to think we can. We try, in many ways. Ultimately, human life is fragile and fleeting. We are fallible creatures. We are dust, and to dust we will one day return - from sinew to earth.
I knew this when Sarah was born. I know it still. Compassion filled my heart, along with a knowing, in that loaded statement from my optometrist - “We live in an exhausting world” - because no qualifiers are needed. You have your definition of what is exhausting about your life, about living. I have mine.
And we all live in this world. We are all participants in this one, beautiful life. What will we make of it? Will we die much as we have lived: hollow, shallow, half-awake? Or will we die having immersed ourselves in all of what it means to be fully alive: the shattering, the rebuilding? Even the exhaustion?
Here’s what I know: Life is an invitation to revive what has fallen asleep in us. It is time to awaken our senses and our entire beings to what is possible now, today. Because now is all we have, and it is rife with opportunity to create and share beauty in the midst of detritus, to become the better person we’ve intended to be, to discover what we are truly capable of.
Thank you for this post; you said a few things that have been rolling around in my bran. We do live in an exhausting world!
What a light your writing is. I especially resonated with fully living and fully dying. For me, it was love that gave me courage when I was afraid. Thank you for sharing your heart, it’s so encouraging.