First of all, I often thought about Buddhist monks who will do one single, simple action all day in order to reach a meditative state--for example, hitting a gong with a mallet all day long, or repeating one word over and over again. I thought about the actions and keystrokes that I repeated time and time again with each OSHA form with only slight variation, and hoped that on some level what I was doing was meditative. Once I got past the frustration and monotony, I think I did learn something about patience and repetition. (And I balanced silence with listening to a lot of music and books on tape.)
Second of all, I typed a lot of dates. On each OSHA form, I typed in every "date of incident," every "date of birth," every "hire date," and every "date of closing," so for the past two months I've revisited countless days between 2006 and 2009. In a strange way, it became a sort of tour of those years of my life. While we were celebrating my Dad's birthday in Idaho in 2007, someone in Mississippi was being bitten in the face by a pitbull and lost two weeks of work. Around the time that I was graduating from high school, a hospital on the Eastern seaboard had almost every employee exposed to leptospirosis. Someone in Michigan got their first job out of Pet Nurse school on my 19th birthday. I guess it was sort of surreal to think about what myself and my loved ones have been up to, and to realize that countless people across the country were simultaneously living completely separate lives with completely different problems. That sounds kind of obvious when I say it out loud, but it is the specificity of all of these stories that made that seem overwhelmingly real to me. After all, I read the stories of at least 1000 injured employees of one company, which actually is not that many when you think about how many people there are in this country/this world.
All of these dates also began to form almost tangible patterns. Three people at this one hospital were hired on 6/6/06, a woman at that hospital was injured on the same date at the same time two years in a row and probably never realized it, a seemingly disproportionate number of people tend to get hired around the time of their birthdays, and the coincidences go on and on and on. I sometimes wished I was that guy in "A Beautiful Mind," because there seemed to be so many strange patterns and syncronicities in the things that happened and the dates they happened on, and I bet if I was a genius and/or a schizophrenic I'd find some incredible mathematical formulas that could explain all these things.
...Or it could mean nothing. Or it could mean that if you take a step back from looking at each individual story, each individual detail, if you take 100 steps back from each human experience, our collective lives form a big, beautiful pattern... like countless grains of sand in a mandala.
This was a beautifully written post Ells, I loved every word.
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