My knees and The Human Experience

Documentary filmmaker Jeffery Azize and Lisa Sargese

at the screening of The Human Experience

at Montclair State University 9/27/11

"I look at those memories. 

I look at those moments. 

Everyone lives differently. 

When you go somewhere 

out of your own comfort zone, 

out of your own realm,

and you enter someone else's, 

that's learning."

- Jeffrey Azize of Grassroots Films 

in 'The Human Experience'

"Suffering

is a journey 

deeper into 

the heart 

of life...

...Even in the deepest suffering, 

there is significance. 

There is a meaningful process

of positive possibilities. 

We have to recover 

the language of humanity. 

We cannot understand 

suffering without it... 

there's this struggle in life 

in every class of people... 

it's what we do with it that matters."

- Dr. William B. Hurlbut

in 'The Human Experience'

I've been showing this film in my classes ever since receiving the DVD as a gift from the Catholic missionaries of Newman Campus Ministry at Montclair State University last year.



It's one of those life changing movies that puts suffering into perspective.



You can get it on Netflix. I highly recommend it.



The moment that gets me the most is when they're in Ghana talking to a woman who is dying of AIDS. They ask her if she would like to speak to the camera with a message for her children.

She begins to cry (as does the audience at this point).

She says she would tell them to be obedient to God.

If they are obedient to God's laws they will prosper.



Even in the depths of her suffering she had such faith.

Even in her circumstances she believed that prosperity was possible if one could be obedient to God; to love, to be charitable, to have mercy.



It didn't matter that she probably had been obedient and still was struck with her fatal disease. She still loved God enough to make that statement as the one most important thing to pass on to her children.



She's an ocean away, economically worlds away, probably has passed on by now, but I felt reassured by her.

I was not suffering alone.

I felt less lonely in my pain.



I do strive to be a good person.

I try so hard (crying now).

Doing the right thing is so important to me.

By comparison to hers my life is easy. I don't mean to diminish her experience by comparing her life to mine.

I'm comfortable in my suffering.

I get to suffer in the best hospitals under the best care.

I get to recover in a clean, quaint, comfortable, temperature controlled apartment surrounded by friends, fur babies, family, and good food.



But suffering touches us all no matter how good we have it

and suffering can be so lonely.

When we feel despair the closes people to us will try to cheer us up (and rightly so) but sometimes one just wants to hear "I know how you feel. I feel it too."



I had to hear "never again" today and my heart is broken.

I had been reading the brochure about my knee prosthetics (nice how I bother to do that months after the fact). It showed pictures of what one will never be able to do again safely after knee replacement surgery. One was twisting of the knee (I can twist it just not hard or repeatedly) and the other was jumping.



Jumping?

Like jumping rope or doing jumping jacks?



My physical therapist reassured me that he would create modified jumping jacks for me. He explained that I lost parts of my legs in the surgeries making certain movements dangerous. Two much of certain movements would loosen the prosthetics and necessitate corrective surgery, so don't do them.



No jumping?

No ballroom dancing?

No martial arts??



No.

Not in this life.

Not safely.



Hey, I'll do other things. My goal was Qi Gong. I kinda knew deep down that Kung Fu was a pipe dream (Don't even whisper the words Tae Kwon Do to me right now or I'll start choking-sobbing again. My eyes are swollen like frogs).



Doctor Joe is undaunted.

He believes in modification. He'll give me substitutes for any of the things I want to do but can't with the new knees. He won't let me miss out.



But the adjustment to that truth - the truth that I will never be able to do certain things - is kicking the ass of my soul right now.

I have these new knees because I couldn't stand the chronic pain of the old ones. I couldn't work past the disfiguring immobility. I wish I could show you my arthritic, bow-legged, exrays from before the surgery. You'd understand why I opted for titanium knees. I've lost some ability but gained so much more.



You know how I roll. I'll kick ass within the limits of what my replaced parts can do.

I don't need to be on Dancing with the Stars to get the most out of life.



Qi Gong IS a martial art after all. It's an easy discipline to modify for my ability level. By the time Sifu's "The Qi in Me" courses are up and running I'll be healed enough to take them. He wants to see me succeed. It will all be ok (I tell myself as I blow my nose for the 100th time today).



Have faith.

Be good.

Prosper.



I must have faith that my suffering will lead to the relief of suffering for myself and others.

Me and my not-bionic knees.



*Lisa's Video Pick of the Day*

When one is out of alignment with one's authentic self,

stress happens. Stress kills.

Be authentic.



click here or click below