Journey

I spent the last couple of days checking the proofs for the new edition of my novel The Hardest Thing To Do.

In every book, I try to write from a live place in myself, so that the struggles and insights feel honest and real – because they are! In fiction particularly I work through challenges and perplexities in my own life, trusting that human beings are similar enough for the result to strike a chord with readers.

I wrote The Hardest Thing To Do during 2009/2010, when I had some huge things to resolve. Reading the proofs yesterday, I came upon this passage (Brother Tom confiding in Brother Theodore):

“What can I do with all this old bitterness? I can’t see how to turn it into something different. And inside a man, the living soul, it’s like a cistern, a kind of closed reservoir with no outlet. What way is there for it to drain away? It just seems to stay in there, stewing and fermenting and not getting any less. How can I get rid of it? What am I to do?”

Those words came out of my own heart and situation – they were my conundrum as well as Brother Tom’s. Reading them again yesterday, five or six years on, I realized that for me those issues are now resolved. It has indeed taken all that time – only in this last year have the accretions of stuck-on trauma been soaked away, so that the past can be the past, no longer alive in me, something in which I have simply lost interest.

Yesterday, too, a friend on Facebook wrote a post in which the subject matter stirred old feelings – yearnings that used to fret away at me stealing peace. I wrote a comment tugging and picking at the issue: ‘How can I . . . ? What should I . . . ? What would happen if . . . ? I hesitated about posting it on my friend’s page, as it was long! One shouldn’t elbow into another person’s space. I contemplated posting it on my own page, tagged to my friend. I contemplated sending it as a private message. While mulling these things over, I began to wonder, what outcome am I actually hoping for? What do I want to come of this? And I realized – nothing; I don’t want anything out of this. It’s just going one more time around a well-trodden rutted muddy track. I know where it goes, I’ve been there before. And now my journey lies in a different direction. I don’t want to get mixed up in this any more.

It surprised me and made me happy that this response had no hurt or rancour, no sharpness or soreness – I didn’t feel alienated or bereaved by the loss of old landscapes and territories of the soul. Just that those days were over now; once it was me, now it’s not.

Navel-gazing apart, I want to say this to you just because it takes so long. In 1998 the troubles began in my life that now, in 2015, I can honestly feel have lost all power and interest. Seventeen years of my life have been given to the struggle and pain of working through the trauma and woundedness set in train back then.

So I want to say to you, please do not despair. I know some of you who read here are walking stony roads, coping with hard, knotty difficulties you can see no way out of. Life circumstances that go on and on, only getting compounded by the trauma and chronic pain – sometimes physical as well as soul-pain – that gets added to the original problems, escalating and consolidating it all. Please do not despair. There have been times when I thought I would never work through the original hurts and the ongoing legacy, like compound interest, that accumulated as a result. But I have.

I am, in all sorts of ways, not the same person as I was back then. Never capable of evaluating myself very accurately, I can’t tell if I’m nicer now, or less nice, or just more boring. But this I know: it feels quiet inside the temple of my soul. Peaceful and full of sunlight. Empty and calm. All the rubble and trash, the tracked-in filth and muck, the smoke and soot and flood-damage, have been rinsed away. The people who brought them are no longer part of my life. They no longer interest me – though I do still keep them in my prayers.

 And there have been occasions between 1998 and now, when I was consumed by terror and hopelessness, when I could see no way forward. There have also been times toward the end of the process when I kind of missed all the trauma – when the blankness left by its absence felt eerie and flat. As though I had died inside. A winter of sorts. But I love my life now.

This is my prayer for you, who read here:
Whatever life is offering you or asking of you, may you have the courage and patience to go on working through. May you have the perseverance and persistence, the hope and faith, to complete what is necessary for peace and light to flood your inner domain. May grace guide you and watch over you. May you learn the lessons that are yours and leave behind what belongs to others. May you be happy. May you be well. May you be free. May you become so spacious and generous that kindness is the hallmark of your life; and may the love that will make your days sweet surely find you. May you be at home in your own soul. May the truth of who you are flourish and prosper. May you be provided for. May you arrive home in peace.

If you want to, you could appropriate that prayer by saying it through like this:

May I have the courage and patience to go on working through what life is offering me and asking of me. May I have the perseverance and persistence, the hope and faith, to complete what is necessary for peace and light to flood my inner domain. May grace guide me and watch over me. May I learn the lessons that are mine and leave behind what belongs to others. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be free. May I become so spacious and generous that kindness is the hallmark of my life; and may the love that will make my days sweet surely find me. May I be at home in my own soul. May the truth of who I am flourish and prosper. May I be provided for. May I arrive home in peace.    Amen.