rawlife’s BodyBlog

   Last time it was the Lesson, this time it’s the Gift.  Last time was about learning, this time it’s about receiving.  And receive I did, but only with a lot of fighting, nervousness, and anxiety on my part.  Funny how we often fight the things that are best for us. 

   I remember Mellen-Thomas Benedict saying something on the radio that really stuck with me.  It was something like "in the future, people aren’t going to be capable any longer of watching human suffering and not doing anything about it."  I mentioned it in my last post, and I’ve come to find that I believe it whole heartedly.  The lesson on the bridge was the first of many lessons for me; which, as I said, I accepted very reluctantly and only with the worst of all attitudes.  I want to make that very clear.  By no means, did any of this happen because of my incredible desire to do good in the following ways-because I had none.  In fact, I have basically had no human compassion whatsoever in my life; instead I relegated it all to the environment-I could hug trees and even very upset over the destruction of the environment, but couldn’t find it it me to give a shit about another person.  True story.

   So enter Nils Jerker(Mörk?)  That is his real name, I don’t see any reason to change it.  Nils is a homeless alcoholic.  I ran across him one day after walking home from work.  He was laying on a bench looking awful, real awful.  To me, it looked like he wasn’t going to live for much longer.  Sores everywhere, totally vacant and out of it stare, bandaged arm.  Just real terrible.  Just so happened that earlier that week I had picked up a copy of the local homeless magazine here in Stockholm and in it was advertised a phone number to call should you run across something that looks to be in need of help.  I took it down when I saw it, thinking I could maybe use it sometime to ease my guilt at not doing anything(after the bridge incident, my guilt over not doing anything for the homeless and the alcoholics surged). 

   So anyway, I call the homeless police on Nils. I wait, they come and pick him up, I talk to them, they leave, done deal.  Nope, he’s back the next night.  ****, I say.  More guilt.  I feel like I should invite him into my house but I desperately don’t want to-if I did, it would be guilt making me do it, definitely not love.  I call the number instead.  Same thing happens as the first night, they come and pick him up, done deal.  Nope.  Comes back again.  And then maybe a fourth time, I don’t remember.  But on the third or the fourth time, I grow tired of feeling guilty all the time and I understand that I am to do something more here.  So I talk to Nils.  His Swedish is drunken, slurred and barely understandable.  Mine is childish and hard to understand because of my weird accent…so we are on about the same level. 

  Nils talks about a lot of stuff that I don’t understand, but I perk up when I hear him mention his kids and family whom he hasn’t seen forever.  He mentions their names and funnily enough, when they were born.  It’s like he is waiting for me to get the hint, which I do actually get.  So I take out my phone and I’m like "Really?  That’s interesting…what were their names again?"  He tells me and I punch them into my phone.  Then I call the homeless police again and they come and pick him up.  They tell him this time though, that they won’t be able to take care of him much longer because he is not a Stockholm resident.  If he wants, he can get free care in Hälsingborg where he is a resident, but not here. 

   Anyway, I go home thinking I’ve already done a good thing-I’ve got the names of his kids and I can call them and tell them what’s up and they will surely be glad and all will be taken care of.  So I live off that feeling for a couple of days.  Monday rolls around or maybe even later in the week, I don’t know, and I decide to look up his son and give him a call.  I am nervous as hell about this and I definitely DO NOT want to…but again, I am driven by guilt or fear.  First number I call, I reach his son. I quickly realize that his son is well aware of everything happening and that does doesn’t want a damn thing to do with his dad.  I understand this, I say, but his mistakes were made long ago, I say-we have to try and look at the situation at present, and at present your dad doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong(he’s mentally retarded, to be honest).  Son isn’t having it.  I’m polite though and we hang up as strange as the strangers we were to begin with.  I’m kind of skipping little parts of the story here-mainly they just encompass how friggin nervous I was calling this dude whom I don’t know and trying to convince him to come get his dad off the street. 

   Funny thing happens after we hang up.  About ten minutes later, son calls me back and says that Nils has a brother who he hasn’t seen for 20 years and who is under the impression that Nils is long dead.  He also says that the brother would like to get in contact with Nils.  Great success!  He gives me the number, I call, we chat.  The brother, I can tell is not in the greatest of shape either, to be honest.  But nonetheless, he is a contact and he wants to see Nils.  He tells me to take his phone number and give it to Nils the next time I see him.  I say sure. 

   I never see Nils again.

   Betch’ya didn’t see that coming.  I honestly don’t remember if I saw Nils one more time after he told me his kids’ names or not, but I do know that that little success made me hesitate for several days and kind of bask in the comfort and then when I actually got uncomfortable enough again to make the phone calls I had not seen Nils for several days and never saw him again(at least I haven’t yet).  I’ve made several attempts through the homeless and social system, and I’ve spoken with his brother again, but nothing.   

   I’ve spoken with quite a few alcoholics on the street since then.  And a few others as well.  It’s always uncomfortable and I can’t stand every second.  I don’t know why exactly, I just can’t.  It always stems from guilt from not doing more.  It started out as always being scared that I would be guilted into inviting them into my house and that was what scared me, but now it is something else.  Still uncomfortable, but not as much.  One was sitting outside my apartment building.  I passed him up thinking I could fight the guilt.  I couldn’t.  I realized I had to go back down and talk to him.  I didn’t know how to strike up a conversation, so I brought my dinner down with me.  He saw me eating raw meat and thought that was kind of funny.  Then we talked, talked about where he came from, what he had done with his life and why he does what he does.  Then I gave him a piece of raw meat.  He laughed his ass off and took two pieces actually and gobbled them down.  I’m not ashamed to admit that the real reason I gave them to him was in hopes that his internal environment was basically the perfect breeding ground for parasitic growth and maybe I could give him a tape worm or something.  I’ve come to understand that poor health and seemingly ‘bad’ events are often life’s only way of getting your enough of your attention to turn things around.  So I didn’t feel bad about that at all.

   I’m going to end with one more story.  Probably the biggest success of all of these strange happenings.  Kurt.  I woke up one saturday morning with that very familiar feeling-I’m going to meet someone.  Immediately I became uncomfortable.  But to be honest, I was so damn tired of being uncomfortable all the time that I just refused.  Today I was going to go out, meet this guy and I was going to take it with a grain of salt.  I was going to do it with a smile and I was going to be nice to everyone on my way there.  That was that.  No more avoiding anyone, no more walking down different streets so as not to meet any alcoholics on the way there.  I was going to do this right. 

   So I did.  I smiled at everyone I passed, I might have even said hello once or twice.  And my energy soured.  It really did.  I was flying high when I met him.  And he recognized me before I recognized him.  I saw this guy in a yellow shirt and grey sweatpants stumbling along looking confused and I knew it was him.  ‘Oh, there he is,’ I said to myself.  And, of course, I got nervous again, but I tried to fight it.  He talked to me before I talked to him. ‘Do you know where the Maria Clinic is?’  Nope, I didn’t, of course.  But I’ll help you find it.  Good samaritan idea popped into my head again.  This is what I have to do and today I’m at least going to try to like it, or at least not hate it.  So, a woman with a cross around her neck walks around the corner and stops, strangely right in front of us.  Of course, I don’t ask her.  I look for other people to ask, look around the corner, wander aimlessly for a bit and then just look confused.  Then I ask her.  Quickly she turns around and says "oh sure, it’s right over there, around the corner, take a left at that street…etc.’  Then she takes Kurt’s hand and very kindly and intimately wishes him well.  Then I say ’cmon, I’ll take you,’ and he thanks me very graciously and we go on our way.  Kurt is the real deal.  He’s not homeless, he’s got plenty of money, he looks like absolute garbage, and he totally trashed.  So trashed that as we stand in the clinic, getting medicine to treat his alcoholism, he pops open a brewski and sips away.  These alcoholics don’t chug, I don’t think they’re in the kind of shape to be able to chug.  They of course, kick him out and we leave. 

   Anyway, there’s not a ton to this story.  We spent the whole afternoon together.  He told me everything.  He was a retired pilot, addicted to pain killers and alcohol-like 30% of all pilots are, he says.  He hasn’t talked to his kids in years and he hit his wife for the first time yesterday when she took away his wallet and keys.  She wants a divorce.  One thing I’ve come to understand is that things are both more and less our own faults than we really understand.  I try to purvey this message to them and I think I got it across with Kurt.  For the most part, these people I talked to love blaming other people for their various problems.  Since I don’t have any past experiences with them and thus no feelings attached to my relationship with them, I don’t have such a problem telling them that they are in the position they are in because of their own actions and the things they are bitching and moaning about are usually other people’s REactions to their obvious life abuse. 

   On the other hand, I stress to them a kind of self forgiveness.  I told him that despite the fact the he got himself into this mess, he and his wife are going to come to the conclusion(hopefully b4 she leaves him) that the mistakes he made were, for the most part, many many years ago and the life he is living now is just a kind mindless result of them-they can’t be called mistakes anymore, in my opinion…now they are something else, something very natural that most of us would do, I believe.  I told him that basically the only reason any of us do anything is to satisfy our desire to become less uncomfortable and to be more comfortable.  I then told him(in a way that he could understand) that whereas most of us other people have many different outlets to find comfort in, he has created an instantaneous neural superhighway to comfort via alcohol and painkillers, and nothing else.  Not tv, not food(some of these guys don’t eat for days), not friends, not sex, not reading.  Alcohol and painkillers.  He felt uncomfortable when he was 18 maybe being social or whatever it was and started drinking.  A slow evolution began and 40 years later, he feels uncomfortable just being in his own skin and drugs and alcohol are the now knee-jerk, totally and completely thoughtless answer to solving that problem.  I assured him that his wife would have to soon come to the conclusion that he has never chosen the drugs and alcohol over her as a whole.  He chose his immediate comfort over her immediate discomfort.  Not until her actually leaving him becomes a reality in his own mind(which is hard in his mentally retarded state) does that situation even come into play.  So far, it’s always been his immediate comfort or lack there-of over how it’s going to make her feel when he drinks……not her presence in his life.  Threatening divorce is still not the same, it’s still just a threat.  Although it’s closer. 

   I told him that he got himself into this situation, that it was all his own doing, but then I tried to comfort him.  Truth and love.  I told him also that that is true for all of us in every situation and that anyone could find themselves in his, given the right circumstances.  Constantly seeking comfort where you find it most readily available is about as natural as natural gets.  He told me that he was a Christian and went to church 2x weekly.  I told him that he needs to turn the other cheek.  When he goes home he needs to be totally honest with his wife; which means telling her exactly why he does what he does, about comfort and his lack of it, and that he hasn’t chosen it over her.  I told him that she is going to be mad and is going to yell and that that is her way of taking something back from him which she thinks he took from her.  Energy, we’ll call it, the upperhand, the win.  I told him that he has to fight his knee jerk reaction to do whatever and just turn the other cheek.  Tell her that he is done and that maybe he can’t offer her anything inherintly positive now but he can at least offer her nothing negative-as in no abuse, verbal or physical-he can be quiet.  I told him to tell her how hard it is for him and then I told him to go to church, even more often, go everyday.  Read the Bible everyday.  This is his saviour.

    I don’t know what happened to him.  I do know what happened to me.  My energy levels have risen somewhat.  I’m vibrating just a bit faster these days.  I feel like I’ve paid back some karma from being such an angry human being for most of my life.  I talked to one guy on the Faroes for a while, but other than that I haven’t had any more experiences with the alcoholics or homeless.  The guilt isn’t nearly as strong, I’m very thankful for that.  I came to understand that people have to be in the right place spiritually to get help and the one helping has to be too.  Lots of people I talked to probably didn’t budge an inch after we talked.  Kurt, I think, probably did.  I came to a lot of conclusions actually and I think I’ll end with one of the more important ones and that is to not be judgemental and not think too much of ourselves-as I often did and still do.  It is our past experiences which create our belief systems and determine our course of action in future situations.  I’ve come to find that, no matter how many people look down on these people for living the way they do, very few have actually had to live they did.  Meaning, very few have actually had to go through most of what almost all of these people have.  If you think your story is bad, theirs, I can assure you, is likely worse.  We do what we do to get comfortable and some are so uncomfortable that being comfortable over the long term isn’t something that even crosses their mind.  Addiction to a substance is very in your face and it’s clearly, visibly wrong to us.  But there are many of us who have lived these hard lives that have equally as large problems that aren’t nearly as visible that go under the radar of everyone else-that are much more acceptable to everyone else, like anger, or rudeness, or arrogance…these are all, I’ve come to understand, just as bad.  I’m guilty of them all and these lessons were, I think, just as much for me as they were for the people I talked to…and given that I think I only REALLY got through to one of them, they were probably more for me than for the people I talked to.  Thank you and good night.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 2:05 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.