Tinnitus and the Beautiful Ordinary

Even grateful for a big cat named Milo, who likes to drink out of a green cup in the big bathtub.

I woke up one morning this week with a strange ringing in my right ear.

Now, I have had tinnitus in both my ears for just about as long as I can remember. It generally doesn’t bother me much. I go through my days, my weeks, and hardly notice it. In fact, I forget about it for long stretches of time. That morning, though, I had a strange sound breakthrough. It was loud enough to wake me up, and it stayed with me most of the day. It is hard to describe: there was a hum that was louder than usual, along with a  kind of whistle that only showed up with sounds that had a higher pitch. So, when I tried to listen to a podcast on my drive to work, some of the host’s words sounded squealy. When I was doing massages in the afternoon with my “spa music” playlist, and a song with high tinkly piano notes came on, those sounds reverberated. Plus, the lower, constant tone was louder than normal. It was bad enough to almost block out all the normal tinnitus noise from my left ear. That never happens. That didn’t feel good.

It was enough to make me a little crazy.

This tinnitus shift was so unsettling that I called my doctor as soon as his office opened, and luckily for me, he had an opening the next day at 8:30 am. I was fairly certain he would look in my ear at the appointment and say what he usually says, which is some variation on, “Wow! That’s a lot of wax!”  Wax buildup, I have learned over the years, often makes my tinnitus worse.

Except  the next day when he looked in my ear, he didn’t see much wax. There was redness, though, indicative of a small infection, probably something viral. But since I had woken up the morning of the appointment, and the ringing and strange whistle-y noise were gone, he wasn’t concerned. As a bonus, though, he got the wax out of my other ear, because. Well. It was me, and my ears are apparently wax factories.

But here is what this helps me remember.

That I appreciate so much every morning when I don’t wake up with a new ring tone in my ears.

Which makes me think about all the ordinary, extraordinary that I take for granted.

Every morning when I wake up and the world around me is not on fire (because fires are raging through the West right now). Every morning when my son wakes up safe and happy and smiles at me and says, “Good morning” (because some mother somewhere lost her boy yesterday, and it is killing her now. And some mother somewhere has a son who will never say good morning, because he has autism or another communication disorder).  Every morning that I get a Snapchat from my daughter and know that she is OK in hew new apartment with her new roommates (because some daughters find themselves in horrific roommate situations.) Every morning when I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom (because there are women around the world who are not safe in their homes, and who do not even have private places to go to the bathroom,  along with all the people who are not able to walk anymore, or who were never able to walk. Along with the multitudes who do not have running water.)

It goes on and on, an endless list of all the ordinary things that I forget to honor, forget to appreciate.

(Toilet paper at Costco. Cell phones. Electricity. Flush toilets. Vaccines. Sunshine. Trees. Birds at the feeders. Cream for my tea. Tea. Spinach. Retreat centers.  Peaches. A dog named Biscuit. Even a cat named Milo)

I give thanks for all the things that did not go wrong today. For all the ordinary parts of my life that went as expected,  while trying to hold space for the pain and injustice and loss that exist all around me, for all the suffering that comes close to me.

My ear is back to normal. The tinnitus has calmed.  My heart is beating. I woke up this morning. I slept last night. I dreamt dreams. It is brilliant and crazy that it works as well as it does so much of the time. How is it that it all keeps working? Even though it is starting to feel some days like maybe it is not holding together so well anymore, that the center is shaky, that we are about to spin off into the abyss. Even with all this? We woke up. We are alive. We have this day, this beautiful, only day. We have this ordinary, extraordinary life.