I was listening to an audiotape of a talk by Joan
Borysenko recently in which she talked about the liminal space between the
"no longer" and the "not yet." This is a space of new
beginnings, a transformational stage when doors from the past have closed, but
the doors to the future haven't yet appeared. It's not a space of waiting,
though. Instead, it's a place of being.
Don't ask me why I find this so intriguing. I live my
life--and I write--by mining the past, and fantasizing about the future. If there's a space I've rarely been comfortable
inhabiting, it's the here and now. And I find the idea of just
"being" less transformative than terrifying. I'm very skilled at
avoiding being in the moment, because being in the moment requires my full
presence, and that in turn requires being inside of, fully acknowledging and taking responsibility for the expression of my
feelings. Somewhere back in that past I like to examine from afar, I learned to
deny and sublimate feelings, usually by substituting food for anger, sadness,
or fear. The idea of simply being in my fear or my anger and feeling it--all
the way down to ground zero--was never an option.
Something has changed.
It might be the fact that in a period just eight months,
I recently lost my aunt, my sister, my father, and a close friend. My sister's
loss was entirely unexpected; both my aunt and my father had been ill a very
long time. My friend fought cancer for two years, and she was fully present
throughout the experience. I watched with awe as she peeled away layer after layer
of denial, fear and anger until she was left with nothing but the present
moment and the knowledge of her own mortality--very much in the land between
the "no longer" and the "not yet." Her courage humbled me,
and made me want to emulate her. And so, when the time came, I chose to be
present with my father, to be witness to the process of his dying, and to
companion him as far as I could-- because, unlike my friend, my father never
came to peace with his dying, unless it was in those very last moments, when
his body took over and brought him out of denial and into the present moment.
That seems to be where truth lives.
Something happened to me over those months. I stopped
fearing death, and I stopped fearing my own emotions. I started feeling my
feelings, claiming my truths, and becoming willing to live with uncertainty and
ambiguity in nearly every area of my life.
This has been anything but comfortable--and it isn't like
I don't backslide a lot. Still, it's made me feel more alive, more a part of
myself, than I ever remember feeling before.
I'm taking each day less for granted. In moments when I do backslide
into mindlessness, denial or negative thinking, it's made me an interested and indulgent
observer of my own behavior--the patient mother watching the antics of a
spoiled and overtired child who needs a nap.
For the most part, I've gotten off my own back, and this is definitely new behavior. An unexpected side effect is that it'made me
less concerned about what other people think, more willing to take risks.
I don't know where this journey is taking me, but it's a
fascinating ride, an "E-ticket" for those that remember them.
So here I sit, in an airplane at 30,000 feet, on my way
home from visiting a friend in Oregon, with not a clue as to what tomorrow
will bring, but in the knowledge that, God willing, I'll be fully present for
it.
Or not. And that will be another story.
