When everything stops...

...so something new can start

The poet David Whyte says,

The best way to deepen a conversation is to stop the conversation you are having.

—David Whyte

And so it was last Thursday when my body chose to deepen its conversation with me as well as the conversation I was having with Life by stopping the conversations we had been having up until that moment.

It was early afternoon, and I was preparing to lead a Zoom call for Transformational Presence graduates. I had just returned home from an errand and sat down at my desk for the call, when suddenly I didn’t know how to find my notes on my computer. And I couldn’t figure out how to sign into the Zoom call. And when I typed words on my keyboard, they came out as gibberish on the screen. I didn’t understand what was happening. My easy, habitual, ongoing conversation with my work—and, in fact, with Life as I knew it—had suddenly stopped. I knew who I was and where I was, yet I was lost.

I stood up from my desk and walked out of my study to ask my husband Johnathon to help me. He knew right away that something wasn’t right, yet he was calm and patient while watching me closely. Within a few minutes, as he found my files and opened Zoom, my “mind” started getting clear again. My computer started to feel familiar again. I led the call, yet some participants who know me well may have wondered what was happening. I knew that I wasn’t fully myself. Yet they were incredibly gracious, and I got through it.

As soon as the hour-long call was finished, Johnathon drove me to the local hospital. Thus began a 45-hour saga of tests and examinations leading to the diagnosis of a Transient Ischemic Attack. In non-medical parlance, I had experienced a mini stroke. As I look back now, I feel like I was “stroked” into a deeper conversation with my present and future.

As we drove to the hospital, on the surface I was thinking I would be there for a few hours. Yet in my deeper knowing, I was somehow aware that my life was about to change in some significant way. My relationship to time, to myself, to my world, to life. Something about my perspective was about to change, but I had no idea what or how.

Back home for a few days now, I feel cautiously fine. Yet the conversation I had been having with Life was stopped in its tracks, and 45 hours in the Emergency ward took me to a deeper conversation. It was not a new conversation, but it was a conversation I wasn’t fully inhabiting. In those 45 hours, I stepped in. I was plunged into a sea of “no time” and into a deeper conversation with myself than I had been having before. Probably, this deeper conversation had been trying to start back in December, but I hadn’t fully grasped the invitation. The mini stroke had now catapulted me across the threshold and into the depths of a more profound conversation with Life. I was amazed (not for the first time) at how Life chooses to open my eyes, my heart, and my mind.

The Emergency ward was relatively calm when we first arrived on Thursday afternoon, and I was ushered into triage within minutes. And then the waiting began. Although I had no idea what was about to unfold, I was hyper aware that my mind felt strangely empty. I was surprised that I had no interest in reading or checking emails or distracting myself from just sitting in full presence and waiting. I admit that a surface part of me wondered how long I would be there and what the doctors would find, yet I was also aware that deeper inside, I felt quite peaceful. And I began to wonder if my mind was “being cleared” so that I could be found by something I didn’t expect.

Even now as I write a few days later, I still don’t know what those words mean—”to be found by something I didn’t expect.” Yet they still feel right. My mind was empty in a way I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced before. Like it was being emptied for something new. And it felt “intentional.” Yet it wasn’t my conscious intention; something bigger than me was in charge, and I felt held—taken care of. Even in this timeless space. I felt like I was going to be ok, even though I didn’t know what that would mean.

As the hours stretched into overnight, and then another day, and then a second overnight, I felt like I was in a kind of forced unplanned hibernation from the outside world. Within the first hour, I had been taken to a small examination room that became my private hibernation “cave” for the next two nights. It was simply furnished—an uncomfortable gurney on which I could rest, a utilitarian chair with no arms, a sink, and two medical monitors to which I was attached that beeped and buzzed in a variety of irritating sounds every two or three minutes.

Yet as the night went on and the ward overflowed with patients, I felt incredibly lucky to have been given this hibernation “cave.” Many people were lying on gurneys in hallways with no privacy, no rest from the intense activity of doctors and nurses and orderlies running everywhere, no ability to lower the lights. I became accustomed to the beeping and buzzing of the monitors, and I continued to feel held and taken care of by that “something bigger than me.”

My “cave” had no windows, of course. Caves don’t. So, for 45 hours, I had no sense of whether it was day or night. There was a clock in my room, and, of course, I had my phone. Yet soon even those time devices seemed artificial. Whether it was light or dark depended on whether I or someone else flipped a switch—it had nothing to do with the natural rhythms of daylight and darkness.

In time, I lost sense of past or future—how long I had been there or how long I might stay. Yet I had a profound awareness of the emptiness of the present, and a strange yet welcoming yet frustrating yet liberating ability to rest deeply in that emptiness.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

It seemed strangely normal, and it felt welcoming. Because for 45 hours, some part of me felt as though I had no past to live up to and no future expectations to meet. I was just there. And I felt incredibly present in time simply as it was. Time wasn’t passing fast or slow; it was simply there. It wasn’t using me, and I wasn’t using it. At some point, I remembered words of the author Avis Crowe, realizing that I was, in fact, living time—accepting each moment as it came and giving it back my full presence. No past, no future, just presence in the present. And that feeling is still with me. Avis Crowe’s words:

Help me to be less fearful of the measure of time, and
more fully alive in the time that simply is. Help me to live
time, not just to simply use it; to breathe it in, and return it in
acts of love and presence.

—Avis Crowe

Another part of me was frustrated because I wanted to go home. I wondered if I would ever get out of the “cave.” Yet then I would drift back to living time; to breathing it in, and simply being present with it.

And then I started to wonder about future commitments and whether I would be able to keep them. Yet frustration soon turned to liberation when I became very clear that it was time to step away from a specific volunteer commitment. Not because the job was finished now, but because I realized I had taken it as far as I could, and now the role was ready for someone else. Liberation.

I’m still pretty deep in the strange and welcoming and liberating energies. And it feels like I will be for the foreseeable future. At this point, I’m willing to not know how this deeper conversation will unfold or where it will take me. I’m willing to stay close by my metaphorical “cave” so that new awareness and deeper conversations that I may not expect can find me. I’m open to give and take with time, and to letting my physical body and my presence show me something so profoundly new—to show me what is waiting for me in the blessed emptiness of the eternal present.

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Invitations:

• Join Alan for the Free Monday Meditations on Zoom series continuing on Mondays through February 24th. 10 am ET / 7 am PT / 16 CET for 20 minutes. The theme for this series is “Back to Basics: A Path Toward Conscious Living.” All are welcome to attend in person or to listen to recordings at your convenience. Register for free to receive 2-day reminders and links to recordings after each session.

• Free recorded Meditations for Changing Times on the Center for Transformational Presence website. More than 50 guided meditations. Choose the title that speaks to you and listen. Available for free to you anytime.

• If you are anywhere near Newburyport, MA, join Alan for a free half-hour contemplative meditation, “Touching the Sacred Within,” at First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist, at 8 am the first Sunday of each month. All are welcome.

• Visit The Center for Transformational Presence website

• Learn about Alan’s Books

• Learn about Coaching and Mentoring with Alan

• Consider Inviting Alan to Speak

• Explore Upcoming Programs in Transformational Presence

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