In my life I have spent years measuring progress, scoring happiness and counting my victories. It is only now as I approach 60 that I realize the most valuable asset to measure is the pain I can endure until I reach my own turning point. It is the pain that I see feel and live through that guides me.
My happiness as it turns out has only been a resting point between vicious games inside my head, where I battle the demons that would have me surrender. The pain now I see in fact isn’t a mortal wound or a stab to the heart that causes me to bleed to on the floor, the pain is nothing more than a struggle of resistance.
Each step up the stairway of my life is a step forward in progress I make, however when I let fear grip me that’s when I slide backwards to the bottom of discontent and then the climb back up continues.
In the past few weeks I have slid many times, a book I am writing has caused me indescribable torment as in it I have to examine a moment in my life I have buried for years. Not until a moment in India last November did the demon in me start to escape and I was able to pitch my battle face to face with the Lucifer of my emotions. It was a moment in life with my father which has haunted me for decades.
I thought after completing a chapter on it that I would be over this pain, but I was not. I sat for days and days trying to scratch out the next word, release the next emotion but I sat there trapped unable to move forward. My anguish became so unbearable that those close to me didn’t want to be anywhere near me, my life resorted to finding moments of brief reprieve. I started using pain killers and alcohol to dull the ache in my heart. All any of it did was delay the inevitable.
Last Friday I sat down and just read what I had written, as I got through each word and each line I started for the first time to feel deep within me and begin to understand the undeniable truth, my undeniable truth. And that is the chapter isn’t done, the last sentence has not been written and won’t be written until I have decided it is.
It was then that I sat and simply breathed, I was stuck there so I could see the metaphor of my own life, that struggle endures and pain persists until you decide you have had enough. That past despair can be replaced with the very least understanding if I allow it to be.
Today I allow it to be.
Father I love.
Namaste my friends
