By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

OUTSIDE, the pink night sky is being scolded by lightning and thunder. In between, it gets a slight whip from the wind, and a lashing from the rain. Despite all these, the sky calmly weathers the elements, becoming the wind and the rain, the lightning and the thunder. The sky flowed in oneness, even pleasure and creativity in the weather, becoming all of the changes in the weather, all at once.

Watching the sky offers valuable insights in dealing with human emotions. We don’t create our feelings, they exist with us. Therefore, we should accept them instead of controlling them or fighting them. Sit and listen to our most inconvenient thoughts. A Vietnamese monk Thich That Hanh has this to say, “Hello, solitude. How are you today? Come sit with me, and I will care for you.”

Like the sky, we weather the storms, we accept and befriend our own demons, welcome the suffering, observe, but get on with what we do best and what we are passionate about. It is this passion that will keep us going, the act of doing, which keeps our equanimity and ensures our survival.

This attitude is what made me survive my anxiety over a toothache for three months now. What in the world does a toothache have to do with the larger concerns of life?

Some months ago, I felt a shooting pain on the tooth beside my upper molar. What immediately came to my mind was a former fellow Commissioner at the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), Cora Carsola, who filed a vacation leave from her employer abroad to have a root canal in the Philippines. And so she did, but just as she was planning to return abroad, she had this discomfort on her tooth. Nevertheless, she continued with her normal preparations, and while walking with her nephew, she collapsed, lost consciousness, and was confined at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) for a month. When she regained consciousness, we visited her. She asked her nephew who we were, she could not remember us, despite the pictures we brought to help her remember. We were told that the infection on her tooth had reached her sinuses and her brain, and it may take sometime for her to recover. Luckily, she recovered so fast, and after a month, she flew back to London.

I remember this so well, because I had a root canal twelve years ago, and this tooth is aching like mad. I visited my dentist, and after revisiting the tooth and managing the pain, she sealed the tooth with a porcelain cap. The next day, the pain was back. She opened the tooth again, inspected the root canals, and there were no problems there, except for the deterioration between the tooth and the gum which she said, may require surgery. But the immediate concern was to find the cause of the pain. For weeks we tried, the pain subsided with painkillers and antibiotics, but when I am not taking them, the pain was back. She decided to stop the antibiotics because there was no more infection, which got us worried, because now, we are at a loss where the pain, which took over my entire left face, was coming from. I came at a point that I was willing to have the tooth extracted, but to her credit, she ruled against it, saying, the cause of the pain is no longer in the tooth, and she consulted a multi-disciplinary dental team that included surgeons and nerve specialists.

It was at this point that I talked to my pain: Hey, if you have to stay for long, I can bear with you, but you have to bear with me too, because I am not going to stop chewing my favorite food, talking to people, doing gardening, even if you cause me the greatest pain.

I am flowing with the pain, like the sky is flowing with the weather. In the event that it becomes expedient, I will offer my tooth a place in the night sky, the same way that my mother wrapped my first baby tooth that fell off and hanged it for the tooth fairy to replace. That is how she eased my anxiety. I am sure she learned from the wisdom of the night sky.

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