As far as I can discern, there's nothing Irish about me, either background-wise, or in my choice of draughts and ales. I think that a tall room temperature glass of dark brown whatever-that-is in a pub would gross me out. I have nothing good to say about corned beef except that it seems to ruin perfectly good cabbage. Only certain greens look good on me...
But I possibly share a certain proclivity to luck with the denizens of that island, if indeed there is such a thing as the luck of the Irish. The kind of luck that looks bad, but hides a resilience and everlasting gift for survival underneath.
I've been to this dance before, by the way--I've been sick, incredibly sick, very close to death on two feet sick, and have been pulled back from the brink by modern medicine, by my own wits and desires, and my sheer determination to not die a mere statistic. And I harbor all the conditions I could want for a serious re-occurance of prior problems, and this cancer, as early as today and as late as tomorrow.
I don't know how that is--my brother in law calls it our family's spectacularly bad genetics--and he certainly has a point. Most of the horrors of life-ending spectacularly messy medical trauma are hardly one degree separated from me. I can look to my parents, my sister, my brother Matt who dropped dead of a massive coronary at 44, my oldest brother, to see it all in action, or in recent action.
No one thought the potato famine was luck. No one assumed that the pokey economy of a far western island would ever boom. No one even thought the Irish capable of home rule until rather far into the 20th century. Luck? Their luck was didactic only to English sadists, and to no one else.
But they survived. And in the great diaspora, likely deepened the gene pool, developed new avenues of endeavor, became Presidents, poets, singers, politicians, managers, bosses, etc. They brought back to a place that had been far too isolated new ideas, the seeds of a government that would be guided by humanism as much as catholicism, a commitment to human rights and dignity that has given us, among others, the great Mary Robinson.
That's really the kind of luck I've always wanted to have--as I've called it before, the good side of bad That luck is deep and abiding, and the fact that I think I share it made the 3ams in the hospital when I was alone, when it was quiet and dark, and I thought I felt myself being attacked by cancer and slowly killed by it just as risible as those dreams where I tap dance--because I decidedly do not--in reality--tap dance.
That luck speaks to me of the way I want to live, the expression of which I'm moving toward slowly, every day that I can.
Without being Hallmark about it, I want to start living in my own culture of yes. My own new openness. I'm tired of bitchy, negative, "clever", shitty ways of expression and encounter. I want something better for myself--something less toxic and overall cleaner, simpler and nicer. I'm considering going back to the rules of Kindergarten where one said nothing if there was nothing good to say. I'm also incidentally way into naps these days too.....
I think too often we overlook the type of luck that allows us to look squarely at the life we've had, and without rancor, try to make it better--luck that allows us to be here and do that sort of work that while necessary is not always perceived as needed.
It's easy to go through life as a critic--one who relentlessly tears down but creates nothing better. I'd at least like to go on record and say people like that suck, and I want none of them in my life, and don't want to affect to be one--too smart by half for everyone else, too good for any situation, too special for any emotion. There's no luck in being an asshole. That's a broken quality that speaks to no such luck.
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