Glad

My life has changed so radically in the last 7 days that I don’t know what to say. Unless I write, knowing I’ll reach a handful of readers, I won’t have access to my true thoughts and feelings. Strange perhaps, but it’s been this way for a long time.

In ordinary consciousness, this radical change has manifested as a sparkling handful of blessings. How can I write about those? It would be like a long letter, a narrative full of detail, described in a journal. I want to convey a bigger picture, an entire landscape. It’s a new beginning, a dawn in my life, long yearned for. I don’t want to convey a sense of being specially privileged. As I’ve wished it for myself, I now wish it for others; cannot see any reason for being more blessed than them. So I will try and tell my tale, but where to begin? When you look at your life, and ask yourself “How did I end up here, in this moment?” you might perhaps go back over the last few months, years, decades. It goes back to before you were born, for your parents had to meet somehow and that might have involved the whole story of their lives.

I have spent the last seven days in gladness, relief and thanksgiving. Before that, a long struggle, practical and spiritual. Should I surrender gladly to my fate? Should I protest, make a nuisance of myself in a desperate to regain a former state of health and joy? Should I take no for an answer and stop asking?

We grow up to be a certain way; or perhaps the die is cast from the start, I can’t tell. But I’m the kind of person to blame myself rather than get angry with others. Knowing this, knowing that it’s fruitless either way, I’ve taken the view that whatever happens is a gift. That is to say, I suffer in order to let go of whatever it is I was clinging to. This way I am to become an empty vessel, ready to be filled with God’s grace. At which point I have to say that I don’t believe in God; that is, a being which manifests in the world or in me, or demands my conformance to any ideas. When I need to pray, I don’t know how, except via the meditation techniques I’ve long abandoned. But in the past weeks I have nevertheless begged, not for anything specific, but something along the lines of “not my will but thine, O Lord” without being a Christian except in the old Anglican cultural sense. And various others, Christian or not, have added their prayers, Who’s to say they’ve gone unheard?

On the day that I completely gave up hope—or did it start the day before, or during the night? these things aren’t clear-cut—I woke and didn’t want to get out of bed. I took an ECG reading, I’ve a pocket-size device for it. It recorded a heart rate of 206 beats per minute.

I rang the hospital, they said get an ambulance and come. The trip was fun, the paramedics inside strapped me to a folded gurney, stuck electrodes all over me, monitored my heart continuously, gave me oxygen with those little nozzles in your nostrils, could have resuscitated me if necessary, then rushed me to the CSRU (Cardiac and Stroke Receiving Unit). The hospital is 10 minutes walk away, but we rushed there with blue lamps flashing and strident siren. Exciting stuff.

That was how I got well, after being bullied into surrender, soul and then body too.

It was the best thing that could have happened. In a sense, prayers were answered. In another sense, all my weeks of trying to slow my heartbeat by . . . (left unfinished)