Awake

Peter was warned by Jesus about his pending state of denial. He went right on ahead with it anyway. I don’t think I’m supposed to take consolation from that, but it’s there for the taking all the same. Sometimes, I think Jesus stitched his mate up. He put thoughts of denial in his head, and when Peter was confronted, his panicked mind grabbed a hold of the nearest concept. Without that warning from Jesus, Peter might have jumped to The Lord’s defence, played the hero and died. Where would the Christian church be then? Without a rock to build upon? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an apologist for denial. I will make no excuses. Peter’s story is one of human frailty and how we have the capacity to pick ourselves up, learn from our fall from grace and come back stronger. 

We have that capacity. Oftentimes, it lays there gathering dust.

Denial is the hibernation of the soul and it hurts like a bitch to come out of that state of oblivious ignorance. Truth is, many of us choose to remain in that ignorant state for our entire lives, even when the alarm goes off and urges us to wake up and live a little. More often than not, we’ll hit the snooze button and roll over for more of that superficial bliss. Only the snooze alarm isn’t set to go off at regular intervals. No, that snooze button is sentient and it certainly isn’t your slave.

Imagine that. Sleepwalking through a life and choosing to do so. Yeah, we choose. Just because we also choose to deny knowledge of that choice does not mean that we don’t know exactly what we’re doing. 

How do I know this? Because the truth is that the hibernation of denial isn’t a restful slumber. Not one bit. Instead, it is an angst-filled protest against the light of the world. We hide and as we hide we cover ourselves in a blanket of shame. Shame for the act of our denial, more shame for our weakness and another pile for the fear we fail to face.

Every day that we fail, we add to the chains that will bind us in our own personal hell. We were warned and we are warned over and over again. Jacob Marley visits us in our dreams, weeping, wailing and rattling his chains as he pleads with us to wake up and do something with our lives.

I tried. I tried several times, but somehow I didn’t make it stick. This was a lie that I told myself. A lie to square things and make it seem OK, even as I ignored the pain that threatened to smother me.

When I did eventually begin to push and kick at layer after layer that held me down in the dark depths, I got to experience all the pain I had amassed and the dull aching blur of it reared up in front of me and I began to see at last. I faced my fear and I saw a fearsome dragon of my own making.

That dragon was magnificent in its dread form and I wept at the sight of it. At first, I wept for myself. Even in my darkest hour, I indulged myself in self-pity. Only it was worse than that, this pity was mindless. A foul and twisted thing, for I had no self. I had forsaken my self in favour of the dark sleep. This hibernation of mine came at great cost, I was required to sacrifice my self and risk forever sleeping as I then lacked any self-awareness. The devil’s traps are so clever because he tempts and induces us to build them.

Later, as my mind followed my vision’s lead, I gazed upon the dragon that I must face in order to free my self from the prison of my own making. And I wept again. I wept for the dragon and the disservice I had done it. I saw my life’s work, and yet it had never lived. This creature was the shadow of my destiny and what was intended for me in the miracle of life that I had been gifted. I hadn’t squandered it, I’d gone much further than that, I had distorted it and perverted it and tortured it. As I turned away from the light I had conjured and fed my own personal demon.

We all do this. We all have a dark and monstrous side. We are frail and weak and we fail again and again. Not to acknowledge this is to deny our very nature, and it is that denial that opens the door for the very devil himself. There are billons of fledgling hells walking around the Earth at this very moment. We hide and nurture them. The devil is a supervisor. He stands watch over us as we fall to his temptation and lie to ourselves as we do so. We snatch up the tools of destruction and willingly do his work. After all, the devil makes work for idle hands.

None of us want to wake up from that work. That would entail admitting our guilt. Let them who is without sin wake up and live life to the full. We all shrink back and do as we are told. Or so we think, because if you tell a lie long enough then it becomes a part of the prison that has walls so thick and so high you can’t see the truth anymore.

What does it take to start to want to wake up from this hellish existence?

It certainly isn’t the loss of happiness. I hadn’t experienced happiness in an age. Nor was it the loss of my wife and my marriage. You need to be present to make a marriage work and neither of us were. 

I think I began to realise that I had to do something when I understood that I was losing my children. By then, I’d already lost them, but the telegraphing of such news is tragically delayed and even when it is delivered there is an additional, protracted lead time as the truth of the news sinks in through all the filters, coping mechanisms, obstacles and walls.

In the end I saw it though. I saw it in the glow from the tablet up-lighting Alfie’s face and I saw it in the absence of Sophie whenever she visited my so-called home. She was in the building somewhere, but seldom in the same room as me, and when she was, there was no connection between us. Sometimes, it is when someone is close to you that you realise how very far away they have drifted. Drifted. There I go again with my lies. My failure to take responsibility and admit that I had pushed her away in the first place. Pushed her away with my insular and selfish existence. Selfish even in my imprisonment of that self. I was selfless, but could not bring myself to live and give selflessly. Not even for my own children. How far I had fallen, and yet I ignored the pain of my fall and lazily and indulgently lay there, blaming anything and anyone except myself.

Automatically, I blamed their mother. The mother who hadn’t been there for me, even when I’d not been there for her. The woman who had taken what she was entitled to, leaving me with crumbs and the prospect of starting again. 

So many lies. Lies upon lies. Starting again isn’t a thing. Those two words make it sound easy, and it should be second time around, because you already know what is coming and you can prepare yourself for it. You have the experience and the abilities. It’s a park through which you’ve already walked. Only, it isn’t a start. It’s having to continue in a broken state. A state more broken than when you went at it the first time. You know you’re broken this time around though and you have people to blame. Sometimes you might even blame yourself, but whatever you’re doing, you’re not focused on what really matters and here’s a clue on that score. It isn’t you that you should focus on and it isn’t the other protagonist in something you’ve made into a battle, when it should be nothing of the sort.

I looked at my collaterally damaged kids one day, a great many days after compounding possibly the biggest mistake in my life, and I wondered whether they knew me at all. Then I wondered whether they’d ever know me sufficiently. I’d become an option. A sometimes break from what they considered to be their real lives. I was a getaway destination. A holiday home with a grumpy and irrelevant housekeeper to be put up with and endured. Instead of spending time together, we were all marking time. Wasting it. I was encouraging them to waste their lives.

For once, I did not stop there. For once in my life I wanted to take the most basic level of responsibility and suddenly I knew that I should think things through a little more. That I needed to keep going and as I began this momentous journey I realised I needed to wake up. 

It’s been three years since that alarm went off and I fought with the dark covers and climbed out of the pit I’d been laying in ever since I’d reached that point in my life when I mistakenly thought I’d grown up.

Three long, hard years. Over a thousand days of hard slog and abrasive suffering. Living is hard, and it entails active thought. Thinking is an activity that is seldom indulged in and it is exhausting. Often, we fall short. We stop the train of thought because we begin to spy the outline of the next train station and we don’t like what we assume we might be seeing.

We give up again and again and we suffer as a result. I accrued decades of that suffering and now I have to wade through it. At one point, I thought this suffering would be finite. That it was by way of a penance. But now, I think I was wrong on that score. Life is work and that work is necessary. Our reward is in a job well done. 

There is more than that though, much more. I have moments of true happiness and joy these days, and times when I find an oasis of peace. I can actually quieten my mind now. Once I woke up, I slept well. I slept like a log until six months ago. I slept well despite having to accept so many uncomfortable truths. 

Alfie is lost to me. I have had to acknowledge that and my part in failing to connect with him. My hope is that he remembers enough of me, so that when he wakes up, he can reconnect with his life and everything that counts and has always counted.

My hope is all the greater thanks to Sophie. When I reached my hand out to her, I saw the caution and I saw the recriminations in her eyes. That stung me deeply and I nearly shrank away from her in that moment of pain. But I deserved that and much more, and so I drew in a deep breath and I reminded myself that she had had to wait so very long for me to step up and be present. And so I practiced the art of patience. What made it easier for me was that I could see my daughter weighing things up. She wasn’t just sizing me up and that proffered hand of mine, she was thinking, and core to her thoughts was; what does this mean? 

That’s when we start living well. We think and we search for truth. This allows us to attribute meaning to the world around us. We connect and we relate. A lifetime of that is truly wonderous. 

I try not to mourn all those lost years, because I see what I have now and it is enough. It is more than enough. They say that you get out of life what you put in. Now, that is another form of lie. It’s an understatement. Because if you really try and you give as much as you are able, and in doing this you remain forever grateful for what you have, as opposed to what you are striving for and therefore what you don’t have? Well, you get far more back than you every gave. The delight of it is delivered thanks to the mystery of the universe. You never know what you’re getting and as you look around you and appreciate the life you have and the lives of everything around you, you cannot fail to realise that there are ripples of love that go beyond that which you can see and experience. That one good deed spawns so much positivity and that goes out to any number of people, including our future selves, and that is so worth it. That is more than worth it. What else would we be doing otherwise?

Every day I am thankful that I awoke from my sacrilegious hibernation. My wilfully wasteful and destructive slumber. I deprived myself of a life and even a self. I didn’t even live for those I brought into the world. I built a set of bad habits and then used those appalling habits to go through the motions. I slept-walked through life, ticking the conspicuous boxes as I went, but I never really meant any of it.

I wasn’t present.

Well, now I am and I don’t really mind the pain that came a-calling six months ago. It’s arrival wasn’t a surprise really. Not after everything I’ve unnecessarily put myself and others through. I went against my very nature and purpose and so some of my cells had a pow wow and made a decision to rebel. I hadn’t listened to the self-induced pain that arose from my self-abuse. I literally set out to abuse my very self and I thought I could get away with that Scot free and I carried on even as I felt the pain of that hurt.

It turns out that our pain thresholds are really high when we are hurting ourselves. 

I haven’t been to see a doctor and I haven’t told anyone. 

I know.

I know my time here is coming to an end, and this time I am listening. I am listening to myself and everything around me and only now do I get that we’re one and the same. We’re all a part of one thing. We assume we’re separate and that erroneous assumption artificially separates us from everything that makes us make sense. We have to let go of that wounding notion. I’ve let go of so much and I want to keep going. I need to keep going and I’m not going to lose focus. Not now. Not now that I am at last awake and living.

Besides, I haven’t forgotten that I am a weak and fearful animal and prone to failure. These and my many other faults are what make me who I am. They make me human. But I always have to remember that I am at least as much animal as I am human, and when I hibernated, it was the human part of me that largely absented itself from my existence. 

I intend never to make that mistake again.

I am fallible, and I could well be wrong with regard to my pending end. After all, I am getting old. So maybe the aches and pains are all part of a new adventure and I’m not listening to them properly. Somehow I know though. I know and at long last, I have no fear of death. Death is unavoidable. My end is the one certainty that I was born into. Some say it is the price you pay, but I don’t see it like that. Not one bit. It matters not, how it ends and when it ends. What counts is how I lived. I get that now, and there’s something fitting in my approaching end. I made it onto the stage before the curtain fell.

Am I selfish in not sharing my concerns? Should I at least see a doctor to confirm what I already know? This is for me to decide. These are my choices. In the scheme of things, my scheme of things, this is no longer a priority for me, and I do not wish to share my decline with family or friends. Since I awoke, I have been living every day as though it were my last anyway, and I intend staying true to that, right up until my very last day. Living well is all there is. Death is merely a full stop to the story of a life well lived.