There is a blissful few seconds when I wake up in the morning. I feel fine, warm. Everything is right with the world. The sun is coming inn through the blinds and the birds are chattering and squabbling on the deck outside.Then it all comes tumbling in on me like an avalanche.Everything’s not all right. Not at all.
Then the endless internal chattering starts.
A constant parade of imagined conversations. Possible scenarios. Potential outcomes. Endless replays of our meetings with the medics, sifting and combing over the details and nuance of the dialog looking for missed clues or hidden meanings.
Trying to divine my future. Or not as the case may be.
I’m discovering that even a naturally talented and experienced worrier like myself can’t keep up this inner maelstrom indefinitely. After a week of the constant what-if’s and if-onlys, I’m exhausted. It has to stop. The only way to get by is not to look forward. At all. Andy, my Buddhist friend who is teaching me meditation is fond of pointing out that there is no future. at least not that is accessible to us in any useful way. There is only now. This moment. and now this moment. And so on.
Ir course it’s all easier said than done. Reading the future has always been a specialty of mine. I’m an expert at it. World class. I’ve spent most of my adult life taking a few meager threads of doubt in the present moment, and weaving epic and elaborate tapestries of failure, humiliation and despair somewhere in the future.
In spite of all the years of intensive practice, I was rubbish at the fortune telling business. I can see that now. We all are. Almost without exception those long dark nights spent constructing and rehearsing worse-case-scenarios and dismal outcomes turned out to be a waste of sweat, Prozac and finger-nails. Whether it was a trip to the dentist, or a difficult client meeting, the nightmare never came to pass.
Then one day, when you wake up to the real nightmare, you realize that you never even saw it coming.
Living in the moment is the only way forward for me right now.
Que sera sera…
