Dear StillTrying -

Hi, I'm glad you are here. As much as we may regret the circumstances.

I hear you on the issue of total defeat, loud and clear. But, please bear in mind a concept that tends to play out in the end: every impossible problem is just the solution to another problem. At the ultimate extreme, a black whole in one universe may be the big bang in the next.

In our own lives, the best we can do is look upon ourselves with love and kindness, and make our choices are available, based on what we have in front of us, as opposed to our long-held expectations. Then we find the best fit for what we know have to work with, and who we are - right now - is the solution for that other question: the perfect person our optimal (as opposed to ideal) choice of lifestyle would seek out, assuming it had a search committee.

The other way to look at the whole thing is that lasting happiness can never be dependent upon conditions, 'cause the one thing conditions do is change.

That said, it's true I didn't have to deal with this as a young man. And the suffering of sensing that one has been cheated out of life must be overwhelming.

As a 48 year old bankruptcy attorney with a wife and two young boys, I had my own - and other's - set(s) of expectations to deal with. And walking away from a career I had spent 24 years developing wasn't easy. For me, things began to change once I got involved with the meditation community, which happened to be good sized where I lived at the time. Although I had not turned a profit in it since becoming ill, I had been despirately clinging to my professional "identity." Then one day at my desk, it just hit me: giving up my identity as a lawyer meant nothing more than dropping a pre-existing set of expectations that were really nothing more than atttachments to old things that used to make me happy, but no longer did. At which point, I could freely and happily begin the process of unwinding my law practice.

Karen Horney, one of the great social psychologists of the mid-20th Century, defined neurosis as the pattern of holding onto conditioned responses, once stimulous had ceased. And don't worry, I'm not calling you neurotic! It's just what we all face when confronted with big changes.

ALL that said, I truly believe that treating ourselves - as we are - with love and kindness most always be our fundamental place of orientation. May you be happy.

Mike

Dear Mike --

You are so fortunate that you could not only mentally adjust but that you could also easily AFFORD to just walk away from a law practice. I envy you and your family...I have also tried very hard to use mindfulness to help me in my current situation. But no amount of meditation is going to change the fact that we need for me to work, and to earn benefits and to save for retirement, rather than retire at age 49 into a life of disability. It's just not in the cards...so I need to get better.

You are truly blessed.

XOXOX Sandy

Sandy -

Thank you for the good thoughts. But understand I never meant to imply that work and a meditative perspective are mutually exclusive. Far from it. Just that everyone has to play the hand they've been dealt with as much focus as they can bring to the thing at hand. In the world of "mindful pain management," it is said that Suffering = Pain X Resistance. The advice I'm giving is to avoid sailing into headwinds, and if that's where you have to go, then you need to first learn how to tact. Simple as that. Or in an even more physical metaphor, use the greater mass of an opposing body to fling yourself around it. But for God's sake, don't think for more than five minutes that all is lost just because every assumption and plan of and about who you are and what you would become has suddenly come undone.

Think instaed of incorporating a little Tai Chi in your toolkit. Because it's a break that anyone trying to navigate their way through the world of work and CRPS definitely needs. And always, always, always question your own operating assumptions.

For me, it wasn't a matter of being able to afford to walk away from a law practice, as much as it was that post-injury, as hard as I could work, I was only able to make enough to cover my office overhead operation, netting maybe a few hundred a month, all the while we were scraping by on my wife's salary: and no private schools in sight.

That said, and for the record, after being told by the agent who had sold me a disability policy 14 years earlier, that it didn't cover me so long as I made something through my employment, I let it go for a while until another lawyer in my office demanded to read the policy. I had that protection all along, so long as my income had dropped "substantially" on account of illness of injury. And because this was a private policy, paid for on my own with after tax dollars, there was no ERISA pre-emption and good old pro-plaintiff California case law governed.

And I filed the completed disability claim with the carrier - all schedules attached - several weeks prior to making the decision to fold up the tent, and the two really had nothing to do with each other. Even as I filed the insurance claim, I was not prepared to giving up my professional identity, honed of years dinner meetings in Los Angeles and flying around the country to attend professional meetings with the same crowd, not that I had done much professional travel since falling ill.

But there was no hope of me turning a profit let alone surviving the demanding work of business bankruptcy litigation in this condition, each side pummeling the other with one or two motions a day. And although I didn't realize it, it was just a matter of time before I had to let go. (I got through the last deposition of my career that of another attorney in some really unpleasant litigation - one of the nastiest of my carrier - stood up and collapsed on the floor in spasms and didn't get out of bed for two days thereafter.) The meditative perspective was really more of an extremely helpful catalyst than anything.

But, the fact that there was something of a soft landing was just a happy accident: I certainly had no idea what was going to happen to my claim when I notified the carrier that I would be moving on.

Finally, there's another issue I have to deal with. A year and a half before this even hit, when it was clear to all the I was not exactly "Mr. Efficiency" - putting in 14 hour days when only 10 - 11 were expected, I was finally diagnosed with adult ADD. But I couldn't tolerate any of the stimulant meds, which is what sent me to my doom at the gym in the first place: trying to keeps my focus by getting back in shape.

Since then it's only gotten worse. As I seem to recall mentioning a little while back, keeping control of paper has become impossible for me. Little known fact, the large majority of people have composite "verbal" (including arithmetic, algebra, etc.) and "non-verbal" (largely spatial reasoning) IQ scores within 3 point of each other. When the scores diverge to 6, educational psychologists take note, at 12 the kid is referred out for script. When last tested a month ago, I was at an "extreme" 45 points. Just trying to physically enter clean hand-printed comments on a four page documents and fax it out this afternoon was enough to send me into apoplexy. So while I can navigate PubMed okay, and know how to look things up, I realize that there's no way I could work 35 hours a week as a librarian, for instance. When the rubber hits the road, I just don't have the clutch!

Finally, getting back to the theme of every problem as a solution to another question, when I did a couple of Shinzen Young's call-in programs last weekend, one meditative technique came up that I love: Doing Nothing. Sitting for an hour with my ADD brain and no intention, goal, focus or method. And as soon as you notice even the most subtle of intentions, as in following a will o'wisp of random thought because it ignites even the mildest quality of interest, you recognize that as intention and drop it as well. And in that one, I had a ball.

Mike

Thank you. Very much.

I have a disability policy. I was told that my shoulder injury, which had just occurred (and in my mind was a relatively minor event), was going to be deemed a "pre-existing" condition and disallowed. I should obtain a copy of the policy and see exactly what is written... and attempt a claim anyway.

XOXOX Sandy