Being Polished

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” Rumi

Few of us escape being polished in life. Some of us may go through hardships as a young child, and it shapes the trajectory of our whole lives. Others may live an unscathed life until their elder years. And still others may experience many hardships over their whole lifetime.

Imagine you are a rock or crystal, and every life event, including the joys and the sufferings, form who you are. The challenging experiences in life will rub or irritate you, but they also shape, polish, and transform you.

Uncertainty, a lack of control, and a fear of life and death were all front and center for my family in early May. My husband, Scott, who’d had a cough for over a month, awakened one day with a 103-degree fever. He was already at a high risk for catching the coronavirus because he has a rare heart condition and takes immunosuppressant drugs. 

His doctor told him, “You need to come into the ER.” 

I drove Scott to the doors of the ER, hugged him, and said goodbye. Fear surrounded me as I saw him walk into the hospital alone. 

While waiting at home to hear the results from Scott’s first Covid test, I called my daughter Adria in Miami. As we were talking, I heard gunshots on her end of the phone. 

Adria hung up, ran to her apartment balcony, hid in a corner, and called the police. Then, she called me back sobbing. 

My heart started racing. I tried to be present with her. We breathed together on the phone. And I said prayers to myself. Within minutes, Adria could hear police sirens nearby, and police officers entered her high-rise apartment building.

I hung up the phone. I broke down crying. 

Ten minutes later, Adria called back and said the police were on her floor. The shooter had been right outside her door, firing at another apartment door with a rifle. 

Minutes later, I got a call from Scott in the ER “My first Covid test is negative,” he said. 

Sitting home alone at my kitchen table, I took a long, deep breath. 

Later that evening, Scott’s second Covid test also came back negative. The doctors kept saying, “Looks like an opportunistic infection.” These words, “opportunistic infection,” were the two words we did not want to hear. His primary heart doctor had told Scott four years ago, “You do not want to get an opportunistic infection with your low immune system.” 

An unease was pervasive, and fear ebbed and flowed within me while Scott was by himself in the hospital for a week. Finally, he was diagnosed with “organizing pneumonia” and came home, very sick and with an oxygen tank. 

If you want to learn and grow, you have to be polished. We were certainly being polished. Any sharp edges around our human immortality and invincibility, were rubbed and erased. Fear moved each of us into a deeper felt sense of love and aliveness.

A year ago, a friend shared with me, “I want to keep learning and growing, but I don’t want to go through anything hard.” In so many words, she was telling the universe, “I want to learn and grow but on my terms.” And recently a work colleague told me that she was engulfed in fear and having a hard time moving forward with her private practice. Her fear was palpable to me. 

The idea that we have to be rubbed and rubbed and rubbed to be bright and polished can be very hard to comprehend and accept. Some of us, like my friend, may say, “Enough,” and try to dictate to the universe our growth terms. Others, like my colleague, may shut down, swallow our feelings, and close up, only to discover that, in trying to avoid all hardship, we can’t move at all. 

And yet, it is only when we surrender into all of life, both the joys and the suffering, that we crack open. Only when we let ourselves deeply feel and love do we experience deep sorrow. 

Walking through fire, we melt, we may become seared, and then we soften. We come out on the other side, grossly and vibrantly alive. This is the path of transformation

I believe life happens when we open to everything. And to be open to everything, we need to give up clinging to the past, let go of the pressures of the future, and breathe into just this moment.

When we let your emotions flow through us, there is a release, a letting go, and the container of our being empties. A clarity arises, and a felt spaciousness and openness surfaces.

A recognition comes to us: “Ah, this is what it means to be alive!”

How are you choosing to navigate the ups and downs, the uncertainty, and the hardships of life right now? Are you resisting them? Or are you allowing yourself to crack open, feel all of life and its challenges, and let them polish you?