Advent:Waiting

 

WAITING FOREVER

One of the things you become practiced at in this situation, where absolutely nothing whatsoever is predictable or certain, is waiting.

Waiting, weeks, years, decades on end, for a breakthrough of some kind, waiting to get well, waiting even just to be acknowledged for how seriously ill you are, for basic understanding and consideration from others , waiting for every single possible thing that needs or wants or could be done can be so frustrating and devastating.

it’s such desperate place to be, how anyone possibly live their life in a situation like this, especially one of never ending paralysis, torture , profound isolation, massive inability and extreme throbbing agony?

I asked Linda, my wife. Her reply astonished me:

Waiting can feel tedious, tiresome, irritating as well as hopeful, positive, joyful, exciting.

You can waste your time waiting, feeling nothing else really matters apart from the thing you want but have not got or you can realise that every second of your life is precious , is one to be aware in.

You have to see that waiting is, itself, living and if you don’t wait patiently then you can squander you precious life not noticing it. If you just focus on something in the future that doesn’t exist yet and may never exist, then life passes you by and it’s gone.

The lesson is to live hopefully and positively, tempered with honest realism, but to live in the present. It is to maximise the moment, whatever moment you are in, with loving awareness.

You can get caught in just wishing something is different and it isn’t, wanting to recreate the past, desperately needing a better future, which may not happen and focusing on any moment but the present moment, where you have to wait in an unresolved or painful situation.

Sometimes that situation is dire and you really have to come from a higher part of yourself, just to cope and try to maintain any sense of hope or inner peace and acceptance. If you fight it you make it worse, if you push against it, it pushes back.

You have to live your life as it is, however much it is not as you wish it or as you feel it should have been, you want to stop the throbbing, the horrendous pain, the never-ending flow of indescribably agonising symptoms, but you still need to find a bigger sense of yourself to survive. When you become completely internally aware, you become huge, for you are that moment and that moment is bigger than you, you feel alive because that aliveness is within you.

You have to become aware of the bigness of yourself, the self beyond the physical self. The spiritual essence of your being that is broader and vaster than the limitations of your body.

You have to live your life in a higher state of being, to focus on peace, patience, hope, love, trust, truth, kindness to yourself and others, though you may not always manage this.

You have to understand the context of your situation and respond to it from that larger self, if you can, remembering the the why you are in this place, in this moment, in this way; for one path leads to calm and flow, the other to destruction, negativity and despair.

Right now, my body is in agony, but my consciousness is out there, in a wider space. The danger is getting stuck in the physical body pain, the pain is there, never leaving, always attacking, but you can still be aware of yourself as bigger and wider or more than than the pain, to place your focus away from it or above it or melting through it, being more aware of the essence of the soul, of who you are, as opposed to the physicality and limitation of the body. Otherwise I just become tortured and tormented by my reality, hopeless and helpless. The suffering is endless and there feels no way forward. I have to hope for better moments and remember I can find them.

Linda’s extraordinary reflection, after more than thirty years of unimaginable suffering, on the power of the present moment , is deeply in tune with the writings of others , for example Victor Frankl on the meaning of suffering , Alan Watts on letting go and all those philosophers, sages and mystics down the ages who too have discovered that no matter what, you are of infinite value and your life matters.

( Self-portrait by Linda Crowhurst)