Read How to Be Sick for Free Online Page A

to an appreciation for the hard-working people who go unnoticed but keep our infrastructure running. (I see them from my house—delivering mail, climbing power poles, cleaning the streets—whether it’s over 100 degrees out or pouring rain.)
     

Weather Practice
     
    Buddhist teachers use any number of English words to translate anicca: impermanence, change, unpredictability, uncertainty. All are characteristics common to existence—animate and inanimate. Two of those words, uncertainty and unpredictability , can be a source of a great deal of anxiety and suffering for us because we desire just the opposite: security and assurance. Here, I offer a practice that addresses these two aspects of impermanence . I call it “weather practice”; it was inspired by, of all things, the 2005 movie The Weather Man , starring Nicolas Cage as a character named Dave Spritz.
     
    Dave is adrift in life, even though he has a steady job as the weatherman for a Chicago TV station. In reality, he’s just a “weather reader,” dependent on a meteorologist to tell him what to say. When the meteorologist gives him a forecast with an eighteen-degree variance, Dave complains that he needs something more concrete. The meteorologist responds, “Dave, it’s random. We do our best.” One day the meteorologist preps Dave for his TV spot by saying, “We might see some snow, but it might shift south and miss us.” When Dave protests that the viewers will want a more certain forecast than that, the meteorologist tells him that predicting the weather is a guess. “It’s wind, man,” he says. “It blows all over the place.”
     
    I found this inspiring and very useful. When life’s uncertainty and unpredictability throw me for a loop, I like to say to Tony: “Here it is again, life and the weather. Just wind, man, blowing all over the place.” Then returning to the verse from Dogen, I remind myself that the wind that’s blowing the bitterest cold at me may be setting the stage for something joyful to follow.
     
    I work on treating thoughts and moods as wind, blowing into the mind and blowing out. We can’t control what thoughts arise in the mind. (Telling yourself not to think about whether you’ll feel well enough to join the family for dinner is almost a guarantee that it’s exactly what you will think about!) And moods are as uncontrollable as thoughts. Blue moods arise uninvited, as does fear or anxiety. By working with this wind metaphor, I can hold painful thoughts and blue moods more lightly, knowing they’ll blow on through soon—after all, that’s what they do.
     
    One night, I felt so sick I wanted to throw out all the work I’d done on this book. Dark thoughts. A blue mood. My eyes welled up with tears. But instead of those tears turning into sobs, I took a deep breath and began the weather practice, remembering that thoughts and moods blow all over the place and that if I just waited, these particular ones would blow on through. And they did.
     
    When it became clear that the Parisian Flu had settled into a chronic illness, Tony and I began to consider if it was feasible for him to go on a retreat for an entire month during which he’d be out of contact with me unless I called with an emergency. I badly wanted him to go because I saw it as a way I could feel like a caregiver for him. He went for the first time in 2005 and each February thereafter. The retreat became a major annual event for him. The preparations he made ahead of time were like those that people make who are in the path of a coming hurricane. He brought a month of supplies into the house. He filled the freezer with food he’d cooked ahead of time. He set up people in town for me to contact if I needed help. My promise to him was to be extra careful in everything I did and to call him home if I needed him.
     
    The forecast inside our house for February 2009 called for calm weather despite my illness. But at 9:00 A.M., two days after Tony left,