My situation may have changed, my body is different, but in many ways, I am still the same. The situation only highlighted my weaknesses and strengths. Learning to live with a disability is so complex in every way. I do think the situation will ask everything of you, everything and more.
One way I have changed since my accident is I am unable to think or plan to very far ahead, a week at most. I don’t know if it is a defence mechanism my mind has developed to keep me safe and not fear losing control again. It’s as if my mind refuses to have mastery over any of it. I’ve learned trying to exert control over people and situations to maintain a sense of control over our time on this planet is pointless. It’s as if my mind has learned that I have only control over myself, how I feel and how I respond to life’s situations. At any given moment our lives can change and as mere mortals we are powerless over this. What will be will be, I don’t plan, It’s about following your dreams and although life doesn’t take the path you think it will you can achieve your dreams in different ways. Fate has a plan I guess.
To be honest, I’ve made my peace with my injury and set about rebuilding my life to the best of my ability after several years as I mentioned when hope to walk passed and living began. I knew it was time. If we get caught up in our worries, our despair, our regrets about the past, and our fears of the future in our everyday lives, we are not free people. We don’t need to get caught up in past failures or future worries.
If I did not wipe the slate clean and start again it would have enveloped me.
In a sense I had everything, health, a good job, a partner I loved, and yet I found a happiness, a freedom in giving everything up. I was removed from life’s rat race in that small room in Cheshire. Here alone plucked from my world as I had once known it and forced to confront myself, I could examine my feelings without judgment (something I had failed to do in the past successfully). I could see where I had been wrong to be so hard on myself. I also had the opportunity to consciously choose to become happier and to look at the opportunities to become better in the life ahead. I learned the meaning of simply being. Here my spirit radiated gratuitous, and I must admit this part of my new self elf was much more satisfactory to my being and the deep internal treaty that shaped within.
“If you look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance. A person who’s happy will make others happy!” Anne M. Frank
Trying to find happiness outside ourselves is pointless and makes about his much same as trying to find cheeses on the moon! When we recognize that we don’t need anything to be content, we feel fullness, which makes us happy. It’s a feeling of contentment with who we are and what we have, right now.
“Riches, prestige, everything can be lost. But the happiness in your own heart can only be dimmed; it will always be there, as long as you live, to make you happy again” Anne M. Frank
From being a young, healthy and fit woman to becoming paralyzed from the chest down was a traumatic experience. It was like being plunged into an isolating vacuum as your whole world imploded into millions of tiny ash flecks falling from an exploding volcano; the lava erasing everything in its path. Time stood still. I was cast out of synchrony with the life I had once known . I felt as though I had been catapulted into a parallel dimension where my choices were powerless, my voice unheard and my future bleak.
Being locked inside your body can drive you mad, trapped inside with your thoughts can render you powerless. The daily mental battles surrender you emotionally numb.
Plunging deeper and deeper into the darkest as loved ones watched on helplessly, extending loving arms to grab me. But they couldn’t save me from falling further and further into the underground. The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.” — Cesare Pavese. My weight plummeted and my fragile frame reflected my broken and exhausted mind. The sound of my harrowing cries echoed in the whirlwinds of my crumbled mind but on the outside, I was still and motionless; frozen from the pain that had devoured me whole. The refuges I constructed to hide from the creature only held the beast at bay temporarily, shaking and trembling from every torturous holler it released. I could no longer hide from it.
There is only one exit through the horrors of the Abyss once you pass through the gate and enter. Killing monsters will force the abyss to allow you passage and ultimately finding a gate leading back. But sadly, this is not always possible. Monsters in the form of grief, pain, loneliness, lost opportunities, isolation, sadness and so on can devour you whole making the passage out insurmountable. t’s emotionally healthy to be sad; when loss occurs, grief is appropriate. The question is how to recover and return to a state of well-being.
We all have access to an inner toolkit that helps us deal with life’s demons band demands, and I was fortunate enough to be able to access mine in time.
Otherwise, this is where I could have remained, isolated and numb freefalling in the abyss, this world between worlds, no closer or future away from reaching any goals or finding a way out. Enduring and surviving, merely existing. This limbo of uncertainty can break a person as can years in a residential home. Suspended between two worlds, trapped between somewhere and nowhere in a life I didn’t belong in. Yet even in this discombobulated world of dismay, I recognised a grievous commitment to try and keep going and get out of there. In those moments of transparency, I became entrenched back to who I once was and what I had once achieved and worked towards, I knew I deserved more than this.
We all must survive our fair share of battles whether its sickness, loss, pain and so on and most of the time you simply have to face the demons head on and find from somewhere deep you within the strength and courage to go on, believing that the conflict will eventually cease.
Battles are always occurring somewhere in life and in many instances, is learning to adapt to changes, and how we address adversity can speak volumes about who we are. We may have momentary victories but we are faced every day with some form of turbulence to be managed and challenges or problems to be solved.
They provide powerful opportunities to learn, to develop resilience.
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”— Cesare Pavese
But in some strange way my injury freed me (not physically obviously) but I was always either sucked in by the future or by the past, and never not capable of dwelling in the here and now, where life is available. Our lives can be so busy, so stressful that we are not capable of establishing ourselves in the here and now. Living with a spinal cord injury has taught me meaningful things; I have a renewed ability to see glimmers of the sublime, soft reminders of the simple beauties of life making the case that life is worth living that I did not see before. It took my accident to understand that“beauty remains, even in misfortune” Anne M. Frank. I was not always this good at being mindful. I found joy in doing not being at one with myself but when I was forced to stop and simply be and I wasn’t running from myself, it felt as if I flipped a switch and found peace in my soul. The journey I took into the anarchic abyss of a silent mind were the crux of my being became immersed in a deep inner piece.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything:
I would not change it.”
I think I understand what William Shakespeare was saying in this passage from his poem “As You Like It”. The very title of this extract, “Sweet are the uses of adversity”, he praises adversity for its uses, which he then details. He compares adversity to an ugly, poisonous frog which still wears a crown, meaning that their situation is the same for in its ugliness lies a beauty as well. In little things that nature offers, far different from the pomp and splendour of the court, Duke Senior finds this beauty and states that he wouldn’t change it at all.
From San Quentin to New Delhi, the incarcerated are taught meditation but only so they can see that within the confinement there may be pots of liberation. Otherwise, those in solitary may find themselves bombarded by terrors of the mind.
Unlike a monk I did not enter this way of life with the purpose of seeking contemplation or happiness. Neither can be found unless it is in some sense first renounced. I did not desolate myself as a monk may choose to but when I was in one place undistracted, my world lit up and mind opened to reading, writing, and new artistic levels I did not know existed underneath the surface.
I forgot about myself and my earthly wants and I thought of nowhere else. I was so fully in the room in which I sat, I was liberated by happiness’ and freedom which I had not found before. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape. I was suddenly present by giving everything up and letting go of the past and the future simultaneously. I read somewhere before “one must throw one’s life away in order to gain it” and perhaps this is true.