Four months ago, I was hopping mad. Literally. Not because of the stupid, hateful or venal thing tRump tweeted that day, or because our nation put 14 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that day, but because I had stubbed my toe.
It was 1:00 AM, and I had gotten up to take a pee. My wife and I are those kind of people you’ve heard about who hate stray nighttime photons. There is weather stripping under the doors and we duct-tape our opaque curtains flush to the wall, and put electrical tape over the little red “power-ready” LEDs on power strips and any other electronic devices. Phones and tablets are placed face down in case they want to light up. Not a single stray photon is getting through to my retinas if I can help it; not on my watch! And of course, I’m going to close the bathroom door all the way before I turn the light on, to protect my wife’s right to a photon-free rest. So yeah, it was dark.
The problem begins with having to move into a smaller place to be able to afford continuing to live in the beautiful place we do. Our furniture is a little over-sized for our newer place. The reader knows where this is going. The pathways in the dark are a little narrower than my unconscious is used to. Jungians would probably say I am blocking the way to the depths of psyche. Add to this the problem that my hip doesn’t track straight because I fell off a roof 35 years ago and didn’t have insurance, and I tore the ligament bundle under my right foot 6 years ago and that right foot has a tendency to drag and mosey on out to the right, and BAM!
I caught the middle and next-to pinkie toe on the way past the solid bed frame, jamming them into the foot and to the right. So, I was hopping up and down on my left, screaming silently into my palm and squeezing my right ankle. It hurt so bad, I quite forgot my bladder had been screaming in pain at needing to pee.
I must have screamed (silently or not) for 25 minutes. The pain had advertised a house-party on social media and thrown open the door for fear, anger, self-loathing and self-pity. Fear that I had severely damaged the toes and the top of the foot. Fears that I would have to go to the ER and pay the deductible. Fear that maybe this was it; this time the damage would be permanent and never heal before my death; that I would never walk without a limp or a cane or be able to pedal my bicycle again. Anger over the unfairness of it all; damaging my foot when I didn’t ask for that; anger over the narrow passages and the fiscal reasons for them; anger at my wife for keeping so much clutter — I would’ve taken two-thirds of everything we own to the Goodwill if she’d let me; anger over the idea of how much time it was going to take to rehab this sort of injury. Self-loathing and frustration at myself for being careless and not bothering to pay enough attention to that lazy stupid foot and for being out of shape and putting so much weight on that poor foot in the first place; self-pity because I’m just a boy who never grew up and nothing is ever my fault; the world is always conspiring against me.
After a while, the pain subsided enough that I was finally able to practice putting weight on the right foot, and I was appeased that the foot wasn’t broken, but it was already swelling up and turning colors under the baleful glare of the kitchen light. The sight of it reinvigorated some of the fear and anger. I had devastated my right knee 14 months prior; an injury exacerbated by my medical issues, which I won’t go into here and I won’t boor people with all the medical jargon about MRIs and ruptured bursa sacs, I’ll just quote my friend who teaches EMT training classes; “In my medical opinion, you’ve bashed the shit out of your knee.” So, I was really upset over the thought of not being able to hike or ride my bike, because I had only started back on the comeback trail after that knee injury about a week before the toe-stubbing. Being consistent with my food choices and hitting the trail were hard enough already without another friggin’ setback.
Fast-forward two months, to two months ago. I had been advancing benignly on many fronts. I had stuck to my diet plan 59 out of 60 days! I had been almost as consistent with my exercise; walking at least an hour a day, sometimes more, sometimes hiking hills, sometimes riding my bike at least 45 minutes. The foot had been a nuisance, and it had kept me from being active a handful of days, but it was coming along. I had been practicing mindfulness meditation with a group and alone at home, and reconnecting with the Eightfold Path. The front half of the top of the foot had turned red like a map of Europe showing the advance of the German Blitzkrieg in 1940, then purple and black. The second toe had most certainly been broken. It had been ugly as heck, but most of the discoloration had faded by 2 months ago. I had been doing a kind of massage and manipulation on it every day, under the belief that when a body part gets injured, all of the muscles and connective tissue respond by tightening way-up, which pulls on, and tightens the muscles and joints further along, which can result in more pain and follow-up injuries.
The foot was loosening up and articulating better, then disaster struck in the form of a very hard and bottom-heavy serving bowl jumping off the counter and striking the top of the same foot only two inches away from the base of the previously offended toes. OK, the bowl might have had some help in jumping from my elbow, and my careless hurry. Pain, shock, disbelief, fear, anger and the whole bit came flooding back. But I put most of those feelings away a little more quickly than the last time, because it was time to go meditate with the group. They expressed worry at seeing how quickly the top of the foot was swelling up, and suggested I go to the ER.
I decided a broken bone there wouldn’t be served any better by rushing to the ER, and resolved to sleep on it and see if I could walk in the morning. To my surprise, the next morning, the foot wasn’t bad except for the area immediately around the ground-zero of bowl impact. It hurt like the dickens to put on a sock and a shoe, but I did it, and I went for my 60-minute walk that very next day. The foot did tighten up though, and I couldn’t manipulate it as well due to the pain. So, because I refused to back off of my commitment to consistent exercise, the bottom of the same foot paid the price by being inflicted with a painful case of Plantar Fasciitis.
“I should have known better” is a common refrain for all of us, but me in particular. I have a history of overuse-stress injuries going back decades. And I was working with mindfulness, and was aware of how everything is connected, and how in my zeal to “create” the me who was a rejuvenated silver-fox stud who was physically active and winning his age group in local 5K runs, etc, I had willfully refused to accept the awareness that I was on a path to certain injury and further suffering.
I continued to massage and manipulate and stretch the foot over the next few weeks, rolling a glass jar over a towel on the floor; soaking it in ice-water, then hot water with Epsom salt, wearing a night-splint and all that, and it was slowly getting better, even pain-free for hours at a time. I also continued to massage and stretch my mind with the meditation, because the mind is no different than our other parts and constricts tightly and shrinks in response to trauma. We listened to an extended, in-depth series of talks on the Eightfold Path.
I would come home from my Wednesday night group and share some of the details and insights I had heard with my wife. In trying to help her understand the point about becoming aware of and accepting our own various mental states, be they positive or negative, helpful or unhelpful, without letting them persist to the degree of ruling us, I used the example of my stubbed toe to talk about anger.
“But anger is a natural human emotion; we can’t avoid feeling anger,” she said.
“True, but it’s like when I stubbed my toe; my anger over a stubbed toe should last for precisely as long as the pain lasts, and no longer. If I hold onto my anger any longer than that, I am not doing anything useful for myself or anyone else. And if I do hold onto anger for longer, the hope is at least, that I can become aware of how my negative mental states are persisting, and the real reasons for it; like the fear of loss and the fear of more pain and suffering in the future. If I can become aware enough of my own habitual thought processes, maybe I can allow them to desist more quickly while producing less harm.”
“You should write a Dharma talk,” she laughed. “Call it, ‘the stubbed toe Sutra.”
Maybe I will.
Fastforward again to 5 days ago. I stubbed the second toe on my right foot on the sofa leg. Again. It really, truly absolutely frickin’ hurt. I slapped the table top in frustration and anger; that foot had almost healed completely! it was swelling up like a Vienna sausage and turning purple quickly. I yelled only once and then gave a series of loud seething sighs. My wife looked up from her laptop in concern. At that moment, I became aware of how my display of temper was affecting her; making her anxious. She grew up in an apparently magical family. She claims that throughout her childhood she cannot remember more than three episodes where anyone in her family overtly displayed anger or yelled loudly. I am skeptical of her claim, of course, and think maybe she has suppressed memories of more times people were angry, but that might just be my childhood informing me of what reality is like; my parents fought and yelled like cats and dogs a million times, even though they loved each other dearly. Be that as it may, her anxiety over my display of anger was real.
I became aware that the mental state I was beginning to habitually embrace was harming her. I became aware of the uselessness of prolonging my anger and how it was actually destructive. I decided to see what else I could become mindful of. I was aware of the narrowness of the passages in our place; aware of my propensity for having a lazy foot that catches on everything; aware of the fact that no matter how mindful I try to be of the first two facts, shit will always happen; toes will be stubbed. Everybody stubs their toe every now and then; kings and queens, priests and paupers alike; we stub our toes. The Buddha, who sat under a tree and thought up the Eightfold Path with naught but the technology of his mind, stubbed his sandaled toe now and then.
I laughed out loud at that last thought, because it reminded me of Han Yu and his Essay, Memorial on the Bone-Relics of the Buddha. Han Yu was the preeminent scholar of his time in Tang China. He was considered one of the best at writing the eight-legged essay, the preferred rubric of the time. He was also a conservative Confucian and a xenophobe who hated Buddhism and disapproved of Taoism. His main objection to Buddhism was that it was foreign in origin, thus was “barbarian” as opposed to Confucianism, which was home-grown, thus “civilized.” He hated Taoism less, because it also originated in China, but he disagreed with its ideology.
in 819 CE, Han Yu wrote his essay, which offended the emperor deeply, because the emperor embraced the philosophy that “the three religions are one” — in other words he tolerated and accepted all three of the major religions in China at the time, supported their arts and temple building etc. The emperor was so offended that he ordered Han Yu’s immediate execution, but other officials got in his ear and saved Han Yu, who was only exiled to the hinterlands; but his star had certainly fallen. The gist of the essay was that Han Yu objected to lavish public displays of veneration and devotion to “bone relics” of the Buddha because they, and the rituals involved were foreign and barbarian, and because Imperial tolerance and treasury monies were given to enable the displays, and a few other reasons. The Famen Temple about 70 miles west of the capital at Chang An, housed the most famous relic (supposed) of the Buddha, a partial finger-bone, which I always thought of as “the Buddha’s digit.”
In that moment I thought of how the Buddha was — before and during anything else — a human being, and therefore surely stubbed his toe often enough. I thought of the Buddha’s digit being venerated in the Famen Temple, and how just maybe the digit-relic wasn’t part of a finger, but was part of a toe; it’s not like any scientific studies were performed on it. Maybe it was the very toe the Buddha had stubbed a time or two. I admit that I’ve thought more than once in the past, that I wanted to cut off an offending body part, like a stubbed toe, or a toe with an in-grown nail, so that it would take all the pain with it and go. Maybe the Buddha, when he was young and full of vinegar, had similar thoughts about cutting off a stubbed toe to rid himself of the pain and suffering attached to it. Maybe the very same toe sitting in the Famen Temple and being venerated by thousands, driving xenophobes to write hasty essays, and emperors to order executions.
I make no claim to be anything. Not enlightened or even particularly aware or mindful. I make no claim to be an expert or scholar on Buddhism, Chinese History, Religion or Society. But I do have fun thinking about such stuff. And I do know that a time will come in the future when my offending toe will no longer be attached to the rest of my body. If that toe still exists in cohesive form after the rest of my physical form has turned to dust, I do not anticipate it being venerated by a single person, ever.