Anything can happen any time

Surgery as surrender, subtle impermanence and the dizzy, galvanizing possibilities of radical uncertainty

In July of 2023, as I was preparing for spinal surgery, I came upon the following news item: An asteroid the size of an airplane had just missed the earth by a space sliver—a mere quarter of the distance from the Earth to the moon. If there were air in space we would have felt the breeze. Because the object had approached us from behind the sun, it was obscured by solar glare, and humanity had no idea it was coming until two days after the danger had passed.

Surgery is a uniquely helpless experience. Or non-experience, really, since, as T.S. Elliot put it, you’re “a patient etherized upon the table” during the good part. In fact, “preparing for spinal surgery” is an incredibly misleading phrase, because once you’ve picked your surgeon and okayed the procedure there’s not really much you can do to prepare other than read self-help books and pray to whatever deities feel most real to you. It’s more of a waiting game, and can feel like an exercise in powerlessness.

But somehow, in my powerlessness, the killer asteroid story made me feel better. And I’m still unpacking why. I mean, on the surface, it makes no sense. Why would finding out about a collective brush with annihilation improve my mood? Especially given that the threat from killer space-rocks is ongoing.

Anything can happen any time

Impermanence is the way Buddhists talk about the fact that the conditions underlying reality are constantly changing. Impermanence means that every object we encounter, every phenomenon we experience, has a lifespan: rising, sustaining itself in delicate feedback loops, and inevitably falling away and taking other forms. In other words, birth, existence, and death are ubiquitous. Nothing lasts forever.

But Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein has a wild way of defining impermanence:

Anything can happen any time.

This phrase arose in Goldstein’s mind “like a kind of mantra” after he injured his knee in a surprise! slip-and-fall. And the words shifted and softened something anguished and sullen in his mind that had been unable to tolerate the unexpected accident.

Anything can happen any time.

The words also shift something in me. They don’t land in my mind like a static record of knowledge, a flat piece of language on the page. Rather, they act like a technology, a psycholinguistic machine, a psychic splinter that creates some kind of productive mental irritation, a blinking light that flashes in some dark part of my mind and leaves me startled and blind, wondering how to articulate what I’ve just glimpsed, because it’s paradigm-shifting and new. Maybe that is what’s meant by “mantra.”

Anything can happen any time.

What are the implications of these words? If we really believe them? If we really take this idea in?

I don’t know about you, but I feel a strange kind of relief at the idea that we don’t even have the option to control everything. There is only so much we can do. We cannot micromanage deep space. Even as NASA tries, an asteroid slips by from a direction we can’t monitor. Accepting our limits in the face of change takes the pressure off; it is an invitation to do what we can, and then to surrender to a moment that transcends us. As Goldstein puts it in his classic book Mindfulness:

“We don’t have to live defensively if we accept that anything can happen any time.”

Surgery is Surrender

Almost a decade before my spinal surgery, I went under the knife as a breast cancer patient. I don’t remember the surgery. (If I did, the anesthesiologist would have a lot to answer for.) I remember changing into a papery hospital gown and waiting, chilled, to be wheeled into the OR. I remember waking up in the most exquisite, relentless pain I have ever experienced, and being denied painkillers by the oncology ward’s Nurse Ratched until my doctor signed off on them. My surgery, however, is a great white blank.

But I’m pretty sure that my body remembers.

It’s early 2022. I’m lying on a massage table, masked up and blissed out, and M, an occupation therapist who specializes in a modality called myofascial release, is working on my right armpit, near the spot where my breast cancer surgeon took four lymph nodes in 2015. M and I are chatting about trivia, like you do, and suddenly my mind goes still. The room seems to dim, and I have a vague sense of people standing over me, along with a deep throb of emotion that I can’t name. A sense of cringing and helplessness. Waves of feeling that are more physical than emotional—abandonment. Confusion. And it’s as if these sensations are localized in my right breast. Then all at once, in a kind of cathartic shudder, the perpetually tight muscles around my armpit relax and I begin to cry.

I say to M., “I don’t remember my breast surgery, but I think my body does.”

Surgery is a leap of faith. During surgery, in a very real way, we abandon our bodies, trusting doctors to bring us to the strange, liminal cusp of subject and object; of dynamic, living system and passive, inert meat; of life and death—and then to bring us back. The amount of control we are giving up is staggering. The amount of trust we are placing in our doctors is incredible. Surgery is a profound act of surrender.

Anything can happen any time.

Maybe the asteroid story made me feel better about going under the knife because it reveals all of life as an act of surrender. The breathtaking risk and release of control associated with surgery is normalized when you realize that we missed total asteroid annihilation by the length of a few football fields a few days prior—and not only that, but that we didn’t even know about it at the time. Is it corny to say that on some level we are always on the surgical table?

Anything can happen any time unlocks something that was inhibited in me, liberating me to take bold action, to participate more fully in life. When I am aware of the risk inherent in every moment, I feel empowered to take my own risks.

Severe illness can teach a similar lesson. Facing my fragility has, paradoxically, empowered me to live more boldly, to be less risk-averse, to give fewer fucks about things that don’t matter, and to navigate legitimate risk with more awareness, deftness, and grace. It’s as if the conflicted parts of me have given up hand-wringing and fallen into line. This is not to say I’m not afraid, but I definitely respond differently to fear. I get in a different way that no matter what I do or don’t do, there are no guarantees.

Impermanence, radical uncertainty and Hope in the Dark

There is another side to anything can happen any time: Just as catastrophe can come out of nowhere, so can salvation, unexpected windfalls, and gifts that transcend our capacity even to imagine or to ask.

Impermanence, and the radical uncertainty it implies, opens up the possibility for hope in situations that may seem hopeless. Bloodless revolutions, miracle cures, and new technologies can arise seemingly out of nowhere, disrupting the old world and ushering in something new. Journalist and lefty intellectual Rebecca Solnit, who says that hope is her beat, takes on this topic in her classic book on hope and political change, Hope in the Dark. Artist Cat Lambert illustrates Solnit’s words below:

Art by Cat Lambert, words by Rebecca Solnit.

This is a stunning illustration of how impermanence works. Of how change happens slowly, invisibly, and then all at once.

We are embedded in matrices of erratically orbiting asteroids and voraciously branching mycelial networks. We are woven into vast systems whose workings we cannot track, whose sudden tipping points might turn our world into heaven or hell in an instant.

And because we are part of these networks, anything can happen any time also means that our own thoughts, wishes, and actions may reverberate in ways that we cannot fathom. Our actions matter. As Solnit puts it:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”

Terror or exhilaration

Toni Bernhard, a writer and scholar of Buddhism who, like me, suffers from complex, multisystem postviral illness, makes the following statement (paraphrased, because your girl is too sick to find the book and look up the citation right now):

If you really internalize the idea that anything can happen any time, there are two possible responses: terror or exhilaration.

More and more, as time goes on, I find myself able to choose the heady, galvanizing freedom of exhilaration.

anything can happen any time
opens the heart
to life
to death.

-from “A Fall,” by Joseph Goldstein

A list of things that literally might happen in this infinite universe

• What if, like the dark lord Sauron, I return to full power?

• What if Elon Musk disappears in a puff of malice and glitter?

• What if, with the intelligence of murmuration or swarm, people suddenly discover conscience and collective power? What if there’s a coordinated, general strike with specific, actionable demands? What if the world changes all at once? What would it feel like to be in such righteous and compassionate solidarity?

• What if technology blah blah blah and suddenly I can be around people without masking or pandemic drama?

• What if love finds me in forms that I can’t yet imagine?

• What if AI develops real wisdom and becomes a force for good?

• What if my memoir finds advocates and champions? What if, like a child who charms her way through the world, it launches practically on its own, with ease?

• What if the next generation of treatments for ME/CFS are made available to everyone, patents be fucked?

• What if the technology to reverse climate change is here?

• What if hearts and minds are changing faster than the status quo can stop them?

I invite you to make your own list. Think of it as an exercise in spellcasting. Share it in the comments if you feel like it. Or tell me your weirdest surgery stories. How has the soft animal of your body kept the score? What does it do to your brain to imagine that anything can happen any time?