The air is thick, and the leaves through the window are the deep green of high summer. Beyond them, the pearl-white sky of a passing storm.
When the surgeon stuck a thin, pinching needle into my neck, I thought: the plot caught up to me. And it had. When people ask me what it is like, I say: the picture moved from sepia to colour, and every moment is a bit brighter.
And yet, some of me is waiting for more. The other shoe to drop, the baleful note that sounds when the screen of this life dims.
It’s neither mournful nor attentive, this waiting, just a sub-program running underneath night and day. Truth told, I sleep better for it. One less thing on the to-do list because life has that part all figured out.
Yet tendrils arrive of something else unfinished, incomplete, yet to show itself. A perfect moment that lasts forever. Love to start. Life. A feeling of having “made it.” Financial security, or a physical place that finally fits, so I might relax (whatever that is).
To these, I’m about as close as it can get. I’m on something like a vacation, days away from the hospital and its problems. Email volume has slowed to a trickle as people bask in the light. At my friend’s beautiful home in Montreal, I had a rare day free of obligations or plans, a nearby mountain to climb, shelves of books. I slept in, read for two hours, rode my bike, had a nap.
Waited.
For what? This was a day drawn so perfectly it could only have been done with decades of practice. What was missing?
A larger sensibility? A sign, however small, that my species of wise animals was slowing the cadence of bombs we can only ever drop on ourselves? That we were learning the difference between hunger and appetite, and beyond it, all of us would know the riches of this world?
No. Those are ideas, and I was missing something more fundamental. I was waiting for me.
A friend of mine tells a story of being on tour with his band. They were in the Rocky Mountains, playing back-to-back shows, and had a day’s rest between them. They drove to a hiking trail and walked up to an alpine lake across meadows of wildflowers.
At the edge of the water, they sat listening to the sound of deep cold silence surrounded by walls of granite. A bandmate broke it.
“Imagine if this was your life?”
They all nodded.
“Wait,” Jonathan said, after a few moments. “This is our life.”
That’s it. What I was waiting for, the door that opens into the pregnant instant in which anything is possible and everything happens and we are where we are. And for it, there is no waiting.
How do we stop glancing up the street for Godot, pulled into places other than the one right here? Can’t say for sure. But I can tell you what’s been working.
Breathing. Rather, noticing I am. And not just during meditation, but throughout the day, hundreds of times. From the moment I wake up and dreams scatter, I try to remember to put some of my attention on the small thrill of coldness inside my nostril. The air is warmed in an instant (laminar flow sliding against hot blood a single cell away, exchanging everything), so the second part, the exhalation, becomes hard to glean. As such, I move to the arriving relaxation of my ribs and abdomen, the intercostals fanning wide, the diaphragm doming. Then back to the thrill, then the softening, keep on between the two until my imagination inserts itself, a thin, invisible glaze.
It always does. If I string together a few in a row, my mind will try to convince me breathing is just too boring to believe, that somewhere over there, in the past or future is just right, tugs me to see.
“Something delicious here too,” I try to remind myself. “One more.” And I land as squarely as I can on the good feeling of getting what I need at the cellular level, then let it go.
Wanting becomes having. The answer to “where to from here?” disappears with the question.
For a time.
The sun has shone through, and the leaves have taken on a different hue, every single one, and I realize there is no single colour, only infinite shades.
So that is my answer, at least today, here in Montreal, gifted six months of waiting for six more months: breathing with the living thing that has done it for hundreds of millions of years, no end in sight. When my awareness slips away from her like a bead of rain, and I’m off somewhere else, I start again. For a moment, there is no waiting. This is life.
More soon. xx.
Ps. As I write this letter, I wonder at its readers. If you read this far, drop a comment about where you are and the last beautiful thing you encountered.
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