Barb Caffrey's Blog

Folks, the last few days at Chez Caffrey have been a bit difficult. Also, perplexing, frustrating, annoying…the list goes on and on.

So, why am I cluttering up the internet with my issues, as vaguely described above? I thought maybe I could talk a little about perseverance during times you’d rather not have, especially as it’s now Sunday.

When you’re having a bad day, or a series of bad days, the best you can do is to remind yourself that you’re doing everything in your power to improve the situation. That said, the most important thing is to live through it. Persevere. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re heading into a heavy fog, uncertain of when you’ll come back out of it, but you have to believe that as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you eventually will come to the end of that fog bank and into the clear again.

One thing I do know is this: Every single last one of us on the face of the earth has faced a bad day, a series of bad days, or has had to deal with things not of their own making impacting upon their own lives in a not-so-good manner. Whether it’s work, school, family, significant others (if they haven’t reached the “family” stage), we’ve all faced something that taxes our patience, taxes our strength, and taxes our fortitude.

That was the meaning of the apocryphal tale of the Buddha I’ve mentioned before here at my blog. A woman came to the Buddha and was sore in spirit. She wanted to know if there was any place on earth where people did not grieve, where they did not know the soreness of this particularly and exquisitely awful type of pain. The Buddha told her to go around the world, and bring the answer back to him.

Of course, the answer was that we all grieve.

I am not a Zen Buddhist, as my late husband Michael was, but what I understood about Buddhism wasn’t that you didn’t feel things. You did your best to accept what you felt, and acceptance, at least in Michael’s case, led to a far more serene exterior than anyone else I’ve ever met, before or since.

See, he knew that life could give you some seriously sour lemons from time to time. He’d experienced this in his own life. His first career, the one he’d always dreamed of, was not possible due to finding out — after he’d started that career (in the Navy) — that he had something called chondromalacia, which was possibly brought on by very early appearing arthritis. (He was still younger than twenty.) Then, after that, he went to work as a civilian for the Navy, to still try to help in some way, and worked his way up to becoming a contracts administrator. He was very, very good at that job. But then, the Naval base in Oakland closed, and he lost his job. At around age forty. Then, also around that time, he and his first wife split up (and he didn’t know then, couldn’t know then, that they’d retain a friendship until the end of his life).

In other words, he faced a whole lot of challenges, and life didn’t always give him his due.

Then again, he told me that if he hadn’t faced some of those challenges, he’d not have been ready for me. I thought this was an incredibly enlightened thing to say, and that’s why I’m passing it on.

So, for those of you who, like me, are struggling right now, remember this: You matter. Your life experience, whatever you’ve lived through, whatever you are living through now, can sometimes — if you’re anything like me — feel like it’s weighing you down so much, you can barely walk around. But whatever it is, you have to remember that you are still important, you matter, and the best thing you can do is to survive and live another day.

All of the experiences we have matter, too. As does whether we learn from them, too.

I figure if even the Buddha didn’t have an answer as to why we must feel grief and emotional pain in this life, that answer does not exist. That being said, we have to treat each other with kindness, empathy, and compassion…otherwise, what the Hell are we doing here?