It is a big deal.

Life that is.

But not in the way you think.

You see, I interviewed Frank Ostaseski, author of books like The Five Invitations and guru on sitting with suffering, last Thursday. It was just 20 minutes at the end of a wonderful day of talks about death and dying as part of a conference called End Well. And yet, it was probably the deepest, slowest, weirdest interview I’ve ever done.

(photo by Drew Altizer Photography, courtesy of End Well)

You see Frank has recently suffered a bunch of strokes. He’s a longtime meditation practitioner, so he said he could basically watch his cognitive systems going offline, one after the other. My first question to him was: “What do you now realize is bullshit that you used to tell people about sitting bedside?”

Frank isn’t one to bullshit, before or after the stroke, but he immediately talked about a memory of sitting with someone dying of AIDS in the 80s (he did a lot of that in those days) and the guy knocked a glass of milk over and started carrying on about it. “It’s not a big deal,” Frank told him, reassuringly. Or so he thought.

In fact, the glass of milk was a big deal. Because it symbolized the capacity, the agency, the identity that the dying person was experiencing slip away. It was the one moment in our interview when Frank raised his voice. He yelled at the audience, his eyes bright with fury, “It is a big deal!”

I flashed onto a few recent parenting moments. I frequently tell my kids that things aren’t a big deal. And in one sense, they aren’t. But inside of a little body, or a dying body, the weight is profound and need not be negated. Accompaniment, in other words, should not be heavy with interpretation. Witness is not meaning-making so much as it is meaning-receiving.

As paradoxes go, there were many. It’s a big deal to lose your identity, Frank explained, but it’s actually sort of wonderful. He said that his doctor and others keep talking about how he is “recovering” various capacities. He’s not interested in recovery, he said. He’s interested in discovery. “When you recover your capacity, you recover identity. When you recover identity, you recover anxiety,” he explained.

Damn.

So that’s where that buzz in my belly comes from in the middle of the night when I wake up making to-do lists and shame-spiraling about various things I have or haven’t said or done. We idolize capability, but it’s the most direct route to identity, which as it turns out, has its dark side.

Speaking of lying in the dark in the middle of the night, Frank thinks we should do more of that. He described the beauty and horror of the world in this devastating stanza of spontaneous poetry and when I said, “That’s enough to make me want to go lie down in a dark room,” he calmly said, “It’s not a bad idea. I’ve been doing a lot of that.”

That overwhelm is what he calls vulnerability. And he says the thing to do while you’re here on earth is to feel it all. Whether it sends you to your bed in a dark room or not. As you’re lying there, you can imagine all the other people laid up by the weight of the world and know you’re not alone.

And that, my friends, is a big, beautiful deal.

Thanks Frank.

I’ll let you all know when the interview goes live online. Meanwhile, you could listen to pre-stroke Frank and I in conversation for the Commonwealth Club, or watch a bunch of amazing talks from previous End Well gatherings here.