I’m a little late with this week’s blog, my week has been busy with the highlight being a trip to hospital for a very long awaited appointment – pre admission before surgery to replace my left shoulder.
This was the fourth attempt to have this appointment. Three times we had to reschedule due to flooding, but finally I arrived.
It’s a long day. The drive to the hospital takes a bit over two hours on a good day – and luckily, we had a good day!! I checked in and then the waiting started. I was nervous. This waiting room is familiar and it is usually over-crowded, over bright, over noisy, and far too many anxious and sick people for comfort. I have been known to go into melt-down in this waiting room, so this is where, in this situation, Trust really begins for me.
Because I don’t have a car, and couldn’t drive it anyway because of my dodgy shoulder, I have a driver/escort to get me to and from appointments. She is like a human guardian angel. She steered me through the tricky bits and before I knew it we were in a quieter waiting area where we spent most of the day seeing various doctors, nurses, and technicians. I was weighed, measured, prodded, poked, ECG, X-ray, blood work and more. I chatted with a registered nurse, an orthopaedic doctor, an anaesthetist and more.
It struck me suddenly, as I was talking with the anaesthetist, how much trust we place on the people to whom we entrust our health. When surgery is involved that trust is pretty extreme – after all, especially when surgery is involved, we are, absolutely, at our most vulnerable. I am (broadly speaking) about to have the top of the humourous bone in my left arm cut off, replaced with metal and plastic, and the whole lot sewn back together again. That’s pretty major.
In this situation, we have to trust that our medical team know their stuff. That they have the knowledge and experience to do everything they can to ensure a great outcome. That we will be treated with respect.
The people I saw during that visit are not likely to be the same people who will perform the surgery, but I’ve had surgery before at this hospital and I was treated only with kindness and respect. A reverse shoulder replacement is considered major surgery. I’m not worried about the actual operation; I feel the care of the people I spoke with. It’s when I get home afterwards that is going to be interesting because my arm is likely to be out of action for up to six weeks.
Hmmmm. I’ll be typing with one hand. Or maybe experimenting with voice-to-text. Could be ‘interesting’!!
A couple of weeks ago I was attuned as a Reiki Master/Teacher. The actual attunement was a catalyst for releasing so much within me that was waiting to be acknowledged. I felt as if a barrier had been broached and that I can now step forward into another version of me – one which had been temporarily hidden as I delved into discovering who am I.
I have been seeking that part of me, feeling it on the edge of self waiting for the final puzzle piece to be discovered. It’s not a ‘new me,’ it is the me that always has been, but with the ruling mask of Ego better understood and no longer allowed free-reign. It felt – and still does – as if a strength has arisen within me, but this time with more balance.
I hope I do not lose this quiet strength as life throws all its usual complications at me. I hope it doesn’t get squished down by the minutia of life. I am sitting here at my desk feeling a quiet certitude, an “I got this” emotion which I would really like to hold on to.
But there are two sides to every coin and another release happened hours later, this one not so bright and shiny. This is the Grief That Never Ends. The pain that has been bottled up and squished down inside me, hidden deep so that most of the time I am able to get through my day without even thinking of it. It is the other side of the scale – life is not all love and bright laughter; it is pain and worry and fear. I bottle-up this particular pain because there is absolutely nothing I can do to fully release it. Grief for a child which you brought into the world never lets you go.
This pain, and the fears attached to it, literally exploded in the middle of a Messenger conversation with a friend. He caught the full volcanic blast – and it wasn’t pretty. But pain never is. I don’t know if it was a release triggered by the Reiki Attunement or if that particular bubbling pot was going to boil over soon anyway. It does that far too frequently for comfort. This is a grief which will never end. At least, it will never end so long as I continue to breathe – and that, I plan to do for a little while yet! There is still much in this world to explore.
Not long after the Attunement, two sulphur-crested cockatoos appeared in the garden. The first I’ve seen since they finished eating my mangos several months ago. Cockatoos are spirit messengers, symbols of change; they are guides through darkness and they remind us of the importance of safety in your group. They represent freedom and strength. And that is not just something which I personally need, but it is a reminder of something we all need to see in this world.
I learned many things with the intense focus that comes and goes through my life. As a child it was ballet, as a young wife and mother it was fitness. Later, it was how to learn to walk again. Then belly dance and eventually I was pitched head-first into spirituality.
I have always thought of ‘study’ as book-learning, and I find that difficult. I LOVE reading, but books are my escape, and when I attempted to learn from books I not only couldn’t focus very well, but I started to lose that safety-net of being able to fall into another reality altogether.
Looking back now I can see that although book-learning was involved, a teacher has usually been the means of my growth in whatever I was focused on, and those topics with a strong physical aspect have been the subjects of my greatest knowledge base.
I learn best (as do most people I think) by experience, but when it comes to spirituality it is not always easy to have the experience – so much is based on the experiences of others who lived a long time ago when things were very different. We have to trust that the stories are true and not fabricated or embellished over time. We have to Believe in the interpretation of other people’s beliefs and I often have battles with my literalism when it comes to this, for to me, many of these tales hold just as much truth as fairy tales. Both have lessons to impart, morals to learn, warnings to give and outcomes that can, potentially, lift us up out of our mundane lives. Even Thich Nhat Hanh (who has come so much to the front of things I am currently learning) explains in his book “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching,” that there is absolutely no direct record of the experiences of the Buddha. He says that the Buddha’s words were memorised and passed from person to person for a long time before someone decided it would be a good idea to write these down on a palm leaf before they were lost forever. It was found that only one – very arrogant – person could recite all of Buddha’s known words – and who can trust that this arrogant person would not twist the words to suit himself, even if he had not forgotten anything and that the words were still correct after all the re-telling! And beyond that, the teachings were written in languages other than that which Buddha would have spoken, so there would be variations in translation! Different schools of Buddhism were formed from different interpretations – and beliefs – in the translations of Buddha’s teachings. And of course, we have no way to know if this story of an ‘arrogant monk’ is also true!
Exactly the same things apply to other religions and spiritual beliefs systems, and if you choose to study these topics, you have, at first, to simply Trust in what you are taught, but if you seek a deeper Truth, greater knowledge, you also need to be guided by your intuition, your beliefs and what you have already learned. You need to be constantly questioning, seeking into the deeper, more profound knowledge embedded in the surface stories. You need a Teacher.
When you are studying human anatomy and kinesiology there is an observable truth. When we touch our nose, for example, many of us understand what is happening in the body to allow that to occur even though most of it is unseen. But we also Know that we can touch our nose even when we don’t have that knowledge of how the human body works.
We can Trust without deeper knowledge, and for most humans that is enough. But that form of trust is blind and some people discover a need to know more. A Teacher is essential for the best possible outcome. A Teacher has already taken the journey you are embarking upon. They know many of the pitfalls and distractions. A good Teacher will point you in a direction and give you a hefty shove to go discover what you are seeking. A good Teacher can see if you are about to fall off a cliff, or wander away, distracted by something else. She will offer signposts back to the path you were originally exploring, but also understands that your journey may need to wander in circles for a while.
Teachers come in many guises. Some will be there for a single moment; others will guide the student for a lifetime. In most religious and spiritual belief systems there are many people who are filled with excitement and the need to share the knowledge they have discovered. But mostly this is the surface knowledge of personal experience or ‘blind’ knowledge with little depth. There are those who have gained from intense and devoted study for many years yet there are few who have the skills to be able to Teach that knowledge. A committed student will recognise that discernment is essential in choosing their Teacher.
For myself, I understand that a good teacher invokes an emotional response. She offers her version of Truth without saying it is absolute – the student can observe, learn, make up her own mind based on what knowledge is being imparted and what is already held. A Teacher should be respected – not because it is expected, but because their knowledge, compassion, understanding, love, and even their willingness to kick your butt when you need it, is felt in every interaction.
I am honoured to have had such a Teacher. She has guided me through brick walls and melt-downs. She has helped me to pick up the pieces when my world has shattered. She has annoyed me, angered me, poked me and well and truly kicked-butt. She has picked me up, dusted me off and given me that hefty shove forward. She has listened to me and offered advice. She has read my writings and given her opinion – everything from typos to deeper thoughts. She has given me pointers towards things which might interest me – and things which I have discovered do not. We talk for hours. I’ve exasperated her, annoyed her, bored her with my ramblings and constant repetition – but still she listens. She respects where I am and I deeply respect her.
When the question came up “How important is it to find and study with a truly learned Teacher?” there was no doubt in my mind…
If you are serious about learning, then a Teacher is the most important guide you can have.
But it is important to be aware of the difference between a teacher and a Teacher.
Several decades ago I watched the church-goers of a nearby village metaphorically step over the beggar in the church porch.
I also, literally, saw them ignore three small children who had been found after their mother had died. They had spent three days in company with her dead body. This was a village of about 20 houses where everyone was always in and out of each other’s home – and no-one had gone to see why Mrs X, a widow, wasn’t around as usual and why her oldest child wasn’t in school. I was new to the area; my daughter had just joined the school and the villagers had seemed a close-knit society. I just could not understand why no-one had thought to check.
I looked at the vicar in his fancy clothes. He was like an actor on a stage and I could not sense any devotion, compassion or caring in his nature. He was going through motions of that service in much the same way as I took a shower – you do what you have to do and then get on with something else. I looked around the congregation and saw the hats and gloves, the made-up faces and best suits. I saw people who wanted to be seen to be going to church, but once outside the door…..? No. Just no.
For a few years I called myself atheist. I could not subscribe to what I had seen. Then I started to contemplate: did I believe that we – humans – are ‘it’? Are we the pinnacle of life in this universe? I couldn’t accept that. There had to be something beyond us. I just did not know what that something could be.
At that point I called myself Agnostic.
Then, in 2014 I had a profound spiritual experience that changed everything. There had been a lead-up to the actual experience, a dance and music camp which had spanned five days, and on that last day a whole series of events came together in an ever increasing intensity until I found myself in the middle of the night, for 3.1/2 hours in pouring rain, sitting in a muddy field, connected in to that ‘greater power.’ It wasn’t ‘God’. It was way beyond what we humans term ‘God’. The Greater Tao is the nearest I can find to describe what I experienced: The Tao which can be spoken is not the Greater Tao.
Initially, answers to many of my questions came through the spiritual practices of the New Age Belief System, but that too, ultimately failed. So many New Age beliefs, mainly anchored into Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and more like so many footsteps in the sand. There was so much potential of bringing Knowledge and Wisdom, gathered for thousands of years, together in a way that could eventually break down the barriers that humans are so fond of.
Many neophytes, fired-up and excited about the things they had learned, developed a strong urge to pass this information on to others. They believed they’d gained deeper knowledge, a way to succeed. Unfortunately, these neophytes mostly did not hold the depth of knowledge of true Masters and all too frequently knowledge was warped to fit the neophytes’ understanding or to pitch their beliefs in order to sell the potential of finding answers to those even less knowledgeable. Mostly, this was done with good intentions, but the potential for harm was the same. I see this. In some ways, I was this. My Ego drove me to teach what I thought I understood. I did not believe for one moment that I was bastardising something ancient and wise. But luckily, I do have a wise and knowledgeable Teacher, and she kicked butt to get me back on the right track; to show me how much my teachings were far more about my enthusiasm and need to ‘help’ than about deep understanding of the Wisdom, Knowledge, and Mysteries of the Ancient Masters.
Now I sit quietly in my home. I challenge my beliefs and acknowledge that this is all they are – beliefs. I have no way of knowing if these beliefs hold truth. If I knew that, they would be Facts and not Beliefs.
Beliefs can challenge us. They can change us. They can drive us to do both good and bad….. and we need both good and bad – we cannot know one without the other. Beliefs may not bring us answers but they can bring us comfort.
And that is where I am right now…. I understand I don’t have answers. I look around the world, I study in my own disjointed way, learning things, forgetting things, then relearning them a little deeper and with, hopefully, a little more understanding. I look at the various belief systems in the world and recognise that they are called ‘Belief Systems’ for a reason. They are built on beliefs and we have absolutely no way to know with absolute surety, that they are Truth. But I believe that many hold some Truth; that many hold Wisdom gathered through centauries of study and development. I also believe that many Belief Systems have stagnated, that a grip on older thoughts and methods are adhered to through rote and habit without questioning the deeper meanings.
I recognise the potential good in most of these systems but I am also aware of the potential of Man to warp and twist what is good into something else. Something less wholesome. Something greedy, angry, and dominant.
This makes perfect sense to me. There is a truth here. But what it doesn’t make clear is that without birth, and therefore death, there is no existence between these two things. That is where discomfort arises for the average human.
But the truth I sense here is no more than a belief I hold. I cannot, for a fact, know that this is indeed Truth.
I believe myself to be human – with all the pain, sorrow, joy, knowledge, wisdom, stupidity and much more attached to it. Am I worried about what happens after I die? No. Other than the practicalities of those who have to clean up the mess I leave behind. But once that mess is cleared away, and thoughts of me have moved out of the hearts and minds of my loved ones, there truly is nothing of me left here on Earth unless I have made an impression in some manner that keeps my name and knowledge alive for a little while beyond my physical life. There are many such names, Kings and Queens; leaders good and bad, spiritual and temporal; writers, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, artists, athletes. Some will leave their impression here for a short time beyond their physical life and some will leave lessons for us to study, perhaps for millenia.
Is there a spirit self, an aspect of me that continues? I find myself understanding that however I answer that question – one which has been asked for millenia by poets and sages, kings and paupers – I cannot know the truth from where I currently stand. I am within the question – to gain clarity one needs to step outside of it.
I can choose to believe – or not – anything I want. I can belive that I will next incarnate as a tree on a beautiful planet in some other dimension and live a long and stately life experiencing being a tree; or maybe I believe that I will reincarnate on this planet in another 200 hundred years when the drama that is currently building has turned into a replay of George Orwell’s book ‘1984’. Maybe my experiences here, now, will go with me in some form – these are all things which I can chose, in this current existence, to believe in – or not.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, beliefs are not facts. Beliefs are, from my perspective, something which can give you an anchor in this lifetime. They can frighten you, make you cower in fear. They can be what gives you the strength to continue. They can lift you up or dash you down. They can provide impetus or act as a brake. They are driven by our experiences.
We are human. We hold beliefs. Some are massive and some very minor: “I believe there is an afterlife where……..” or “I believe I am allergic to lactose.” These are both beliefs but where we can choose to challenge/test one of them, prove the validity of the belief so that it becomes fact, the other we cannot. It’s easy to test if you are allergic to something, but how do you test the greater questions which extend beyond this life? The reality is that we can’t. At least, we cannot test these type of beliefs until we step outside of what we are experiencing in this life and look impartially upon the experiences we have had. And the possibility of being able to do that is also only a belief!! But we can challenge what we believe. We can study, learn, and make deeper decisions about these beliefs which drive our lives, but ultimately we do believe that we exist and we are able to prove that to ourselves every time we stub our toe – it hurts, we bleed, we hop around and swear, therefore we must Be. But what if that too is nothing but a belief and that, indeed, we are nothing more than a thought? An illusion? An aspect of some Greater Being’s computer game?
Because we are human, and the hardest thing to believe is that we are alone and that we will cease to be, we will almost always try to find a story which will bring us comfort. And there is nothing wrong with that. Over the years I believed in many things. I believed I was deeply damaged, mentally and emotionally, but I did not show this to the world. I hid it and instead I showed myself, like an actress on the stage, as someone successful and happy; and that did indeed, bring me moments of happiness and comfort. But now I see that by covering up and disguising the deeper beliefs with a mask of a fulfilled life, I was denying myself the opportunity to learn more about who I am. And not knowing who I am drove me to deeper despair.
I have spent the last three years in unwinding many of the beliefs about myself. Looking at the various aspect of this person, Auri’An, and recognising that I am simply a jumble of beliefs and I cannot know what is actual truth. I cannot know because I am not yet ready to step outside this life and look at myself without a critical eye.
And, of course, that too is nothing more than a currently held belief.
I have a good friend who listens to me read almost everything I plan to publish – blogs, books, and more – she gives me great advice, and after I had read to her the previous blog, “Stimming” which was all about my experience, we got to talking more generally about how and when people use stimming as a means of self soothing, and it was then that I realised that stimming is not just an autistic tool for self-soothing. It is a normal human function in life.
In particular I was drawn to a memory of my brother-in-law who would, keeping his toes on the floor, rapidly bounce his heels so that his knees jiggled. I’d particularly noticed this because it didn’t seem to bother anyone else in the room but it was something I had been yelled at or even slapped for doing when I was a child.
I know that many people bite their nails. I’d been told that if I swallowed the nails, they would grow in my belly and cause me a lot of pain. I’d had nightmares about a gigantic nail clipping poking out of my belly – a thought which brought about much distress not only because of the concept of such a thing, but also because something which brought me comfort in times of stress had been taken away.
Talking with my friend, I started looking at the wider picture. What else could be unrecognised stimming amongst the neurotypical world? Toe-tapping, whistling, humming, chewing gum, scrolling through stuff on social media. I’d even go so far as to say that our mobile phones have become the fidget toy of choice for most of us.
Now, to be clear, I am not taking away from autistic stimming. As you know from the previous blog I only recently allowed myself the physical and emotional freedom to stim, so I am, in many ways, only learning about this, and that learning is only based on my personal experience. This recognition is more the realisation that throughout my life I hadn’t NOT stimmed. I regularly do many physical things that sooth my body and my soul.
And there is a difference between autistic stimming and neurotypical stimming. For me, autistic stimming is explosive. It can’t be stopped until it’s run it’s course. It is essential in order to avoid an even bigger blow-out. It happens because we simply cannot contain and process all the information, external and internal, that we are dealing with. It isn’t mind-numbing. It is a physical expression of an overload explosion.
In contrast, neurotypical stimming, is done unconsciously, often as habit or boredom. Are they different? I don’t think so, I think it is just another expression of opposite ends of the spectrum of all humanity.
On a Facebook group about SDAM, someone had asked “What is your narrative about your life? Is it things like ‘I am a good parent,’ ‘I like to play football’. I got the impression they were really asking How do I describe myself when I don’t have access to my autobiographical memory? How do I know that these things I think are me, actually are a true representation of who I am?
It’s a valid question. A few years ago I was asked Who Am I Without My Wounds? I had no idea and it became a turning point in my life. I had no narrative about myself that I could rely on as being true. People with SDAM have little to no autobiographical memory. People with Aphantasia often have little to no episodic memory. Put the two together and you definitely have a memory that is ‘dodgy’ at best.
My narrative had become a lot of stories about me. But like stories that are told over and over again there is a chance of them turning into versions that are no longer the same as the actual happenings – a bit like Chinese Whispers. I had no idea how much truth these stories still held because the actual memories are lost. They could be totally true or so warped by constant re-telling that truth was lost. Most likely they were somewhere in the middle, but I had no way to know that. The stories I told were also of the traumas of my life. There were very few of happier times.
Did I really travel from one traumatic experience to the next in such a way for over 65 years?
And if I took away the stories, what would be left? Would I even be able to recognise myself?
That was a very freaky thought – that I was nothing but a heap of stories that may no longer even be true in the detail, even if the basis of each story held truth.
So I wrote them down. Published a book, and then, because all those dark stories were keeping me in fear, I allowed them to go, to disappear, knowing that if I ever need to recall them, I can simply pick up my book and read them.
But people got in touch with me. My tale had touched them and I discovered that my stories had helped other people understand their stories better, or had reassured them that they were not alone.
It didn’t happen overnight and a whole lot more understanding of how I function in this world had to be discovered and accepted, before I could fully let my stories go, but writing my stories – my narrative – was the first step to healing.
This morning, as I write this, a post appeared in my Facebook feed. It was a picture of a page from a book. I read the text, thinking that I really could relate to what the author was saying. I loved the syntax, the choice of words used and even the cadence seemed as if it talked to me. It felt like something I could have written.
Who wrote this? I wondered. And then I reached the final sentence on the page and realised that I had written these words. This was an excerpt from my book Hidden in a Dark Place.
This was confirmation that I had let my painful past sink into the obscurity of SDAM – and I am not lost as I thought I would be. I gave myself a lifeline by writing that book and accepting the risk of losing my past. I may not know who I am without my wounds, but I know that the wounds were not ALL I was. Now, I am stronger. Now I have learned to believe in me.
I now know that I stimmed as a child. Back then, more than 60 years ago, I would only know that I would do ‘stuff’ that annoyed my mother. It didn’t matter if it was tapping my toes, bouncing my knees, chewing my little finger, biting my nails, sucking my hair… it all annoyed my mother and that meant either getting yelled at or slapped.
My dad’s mum gave me something to do with my hands when I was about 6 or 7 years old, she taught me to crochet and my love of working with threads began to grow. The biggest pleasure isn’t in actually making something – and definitely not in finishing that something – but in working out, discovering, how to do it.
At school we learned to knit, starting with winter hat, gloves and scarf. We also learned how to sew, making our own summer uniforms. My mother was a seamstress and she took me way beyond basics in dressmaking. I made all my clothes and all my daughter’s. I also played with tapestry, cross-stitch, embroidery, tatting, lace making, latch hook rug making, rag rug making, Amish toothbrush rug making, twining, ojo de dios, traditional dream catchers. I expanded my explorations with flow art painting, twilling, mala beads, weaving, polymer clay and so much more.
But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realised that all this craft work, was my form of self-soothing. Of taking myself away from a world that is difficult. It is stimming in a way that is socially acceptable.
When I was diagnosed as autistic, I decided that I was no longer going to hide my differences. All my life I had hidden behind a mask which was such a part of me that I actually had no idea that I was anything but the mask. It even had a name – The Actress on the Stage. And after one particularly trying day, only a few months ago, when I had gone into meltdown and was really struggling, I gave into to a very primal version of me and I allowed my body full freedom to stim. It started with hand flapping, progressed to feet, arms, legs – my whole body lay on the sofa and flapped and shook, and bucked and vibrated. It took a long time to stop, and afterwards, I was calm. Relaxed. Exhausted. Yet it felt so right and natural.
Now, I stim. I do it a lot. Mainly it is just twiddling my feet as I watch TV; sometimes it is hand-flapping but most of the time it is me making something with some type of thread.
Right now there is a lot of stuff going on in my life and my need to stim is pretty intense. There has been the flooding; the fall I took where I broke my nose; and now, after decades of chronic pain, it seems as if, finally, I am getting the help I need – but it’s all happening at once and that is starting to feel like a runaway train.
After waiting for years, I now feel as if I have had so many medical appointments, I started joking about buying timeshare in the hospital, and there are many more appointments in the next few weeks, including surgery. I am feeling a bit on edge. And so, about a month ago I started crocheting. I started a temperature blanket – one granny square every day which shows, through the use of different coloured threads, the high and low temperatures, and the humidity, of that particular day. I’ve also made a wrap for when the cooler weather eventually arrives, and a lovely cushion cover in a pattern that looks like 3D.
As all these appointments start to mount up, my need to stim increases. So the last couple of days have been spent in preparation for a second blanket. This one is an Historical Temperature Blanket and I have had to research historical weather records for the north of England from the day I was born up to my 1st birthday. Then I had to decide on colour schemes, and finally, I started crocheting.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh……. The world narrows down to that single length of thread, my crocheting hook, and the pattern that is slowly emerging.
A friend was exploring her beliefs regarding the formation of the Universe and the potential of the existence of a Being – an Energy – that brought about Creation as we know it.
I was drinking my first cup of coffee when she posed that question and my mind is usually barely working until that first cup of black liquid has been inhaled, but this question (as my friend’s questions often do) tripped my mind into deeper thought. This time, as to my beliefs on a much, much bigger picture than the one we look at everyday through human eyes.
As a very young child, I could definitely believe in the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas; in Dragons and Elves, but I could never get my head around the thought of an old man with a long beard, sitting on a cloud, listening in on all the trillions of things happening in the world and then still having time to punish bad people and send them to hell. Even as a very young child, that picture never raised fear. It raised puzzlement and disbelief. And I thought that this old guy with a beard probably couldn’t make himself a cup of tea, so how the heck could he build an entire universe?
If God, or some God-like Creator-being couldn’t have done it, how did the universe come into existence? That was a question that cropped up from time to time over the next few years and as I got a little older, and discovered atoms, it suddenly all became clear. I thought of us – humans – as being mere specks living on a single cell in the body of a much more giant being – who was a speck of dust living on a single cell in the body of an even greater being, who was also a speck of dust doing exactly the same thing. Maybe that was God – the biggest being, beyond anything I could actually conceive of. Maybe that was who had made everything. I was sensing Infinity. I was building my own form of Mandelbrot even as a child. It was a daydream – a child’s way of explaining the unexplainable, but this explanation, this knowledge of Infinity, has hovered in the background of my beliefs for my entire life.
It was a massive puzzle for a child to contemplate. Many great minds throughout history have pondered on this question – without answer. Ultimately, I was forced to recognise that I wasn’t ever going to find an answer, but that acceptance did raise another unasked question of my childhood: “Are we really as important as we think we are?”
If we are indeed merely fleas living on an electron zooming around the nucleus of a single atom in the body of a much greater being, why do we believe we are so important? What is it that shouts so loudly to us, in the much greater Mandelbrot of existence, that WE ACTUALLY MATTER.
Maybe it’s because we sense, in that Mandelbrot-dream, that if we are merely aspects of something greater, could we possibly also be the ‘greater’ of an infinitesimally smaller universe of life? If you’ve ever watched a Mandelbrot video and considered the mathematics of such a thing, you know that there really is no ‘end’ and that every step forward is dependent on the previous step.
Nowadays, when I ponder this question, my thoughts are, perhaps, a little more sophisticated than the younger me who questioned that an old man sitting on a cloud could be the creator of all that is. I still think that Mandelbrot vision of existence holds possibilities – after all, who really knows the truth of this? I think there is a continuum of existence that will never come to an end simply because the universe is eternal. If I try to give a definition of an eternal universe, I refer to the continuous double-sided flow of a Mobius Strip. From the point on that Mobius Strip where I may exist in Time and Space, there is no beginning and no ending. The physical aspects might end. I might end; Earth might end and so too might our galaxy. These are all things that hold Space.
For something physical to be created – for a universe to be created – there must, first, be Time. Time defines Space. Time is the boundary of Creation. Is it possible for Time to end? What would be beyond the end of Time?
Could there have been existence before the start of Time?
Sometimes, especially when I try to wrap my mind around such questions, I start to think that the concept that everything is an illusion, that we don’t actually exist, that we are just players in a Game of Life, to be quite comforting.
I have no idea what I am about to write about. It’s been over two weeks since I last wrote pretty much anything except the very occassional entry in my Journal. And that is very strange for me. No blogs, no chapters in my book, barely any responses on social media.
I’ve mentioned a few times that I think best by writing, so the best reason I can come up with for being in the very unusual state of non-writing is that I have needed to rest my mind. I need to start writing again and so this blog is just going to be the un-thought words and emotions that need to be released. In other words (and be warned) I am about to waffle.
In the last month there has been the stress and worry of the phenomenal amount of water that has fallen from the sky and flooded a part of Queensland equal to the size of France. People have lost their homes and all their belongings. People have lost their lives. But I have also seen the best of people. I have watched the community become a community. I have seen people reaching to what has always been within them but is often pushed aside – compassion. I have seen the love of strangers – and it IS love for their fellow beings that drives someone to leave their own loved ones and get helicoptered into a strange, afflicted, town and do what they can to assist. Humans are often at their best when other humans hurt.
I was lucky. Only a small part of my home was flooded and I was assisted by heaps of people all aiming to help me get my life back on track. And my gratitude knows no bounds.
Then I fell over. I smashed my nose. It took a week for the swelling to go down enough to get a CT scan to learn what the damage was. And that week was needed in order for the floods to abate enough for me to be able to travel the 90 minute drive to where I could access a CT scan.
Now that all the rainbow colours of facial bruising have gone, there is very little to see. If you look closely you can see that the top of my nose has moved slightly to the right whilst the bottom is off centre to the left; and my nostrils are odd sizes. All the damage is inside and I’ll need surgery so that I can breathe properly again. But it’s not urgent. I could have done much more damage.
This accident led me to another understanding of how my body works. I was offered opiate painkillers because it was expected that the pain would be intense. I didn’t feel much pain at all. Some numbness, a weird sensation that my nose is not where it should be and some mild toothache. I didn’t use any painkillers.
That expectation of pain held by the medical staff got me looking at other times I have bashed up my body. Many years ago (1980’s) I fell off a stage and severely sprained my ankle. I taught three hours of high-impact aerobics on that ankle and then drove 20 miles home. About ten years ago I was knocked down by a cyclist going at high speed on a walking path. I snapped the medial ligament in my knee. I carried on working as a cleaner carrying vacuums and piles of linen up and down 17 flights of stairs (the building didn’t have a lift). Seven years ago I fell off a sea wall and totally smashed up my lower left leg and ankle. My body went into shock and my last memory was of a paramedic announcing that I didn’t have a pulse. Two surgeries later, throwing up all over the place after being given morphine, I came off all medication. I did not experience pain. There’s been a few other instances where there has been an expectation of pain, where I know there is pain, but my mind doesn’t accept it.
I recently read of new research into aphantasia where it has been discovered that people with aphantasia do actually get brain activity associated with visualising, but the information kind of gets stuck and isn’t translated into actual mental pictures. I’m wondering if a similar thing is happening with pain.
Now, four weeks after all this drama and trauma started, I need to make myself start writing again. In the place of writing I have been crocheting. When I fell off that wall seven years ago and was confined to bed for nine weeks – I crocheted. My mind is not engaged when I crochet other than to count stitches. It’s restful. My mind, much like a broken bone, has needed time out over these past few weeks, but now I recognise how it would be so very easy to just carry on, counting stitches, watching movies, and allowing both body and mind to atrophy. It is by conscious choice that I now sit at my laptop and start the journey to re-inspiring my mind into action.
Because without my mind, who am I?
And if you got this far, I thank you for reading this waffle which will, I hope lead me into getting back into ‘proper’ writing!
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