Freedom found in letting go

This week I have had an emergency appointment at Kings to discuss my leg scans and start the Mycophenolate and on Thursday evening my line on the arterial side was blocked, Kim could not flush it or even withdraw any blood from it and we had every fraught conversation at gone 8.30pm to our local renal unit to get some help, followed by a very sleepless night, followed by a very long day today in hospital unblocking the arterial side of my chest line. 

I have accepted I am not well and my life is controlled by medication, my chest line and upcoming appointments for treatment. Last weekend I decided it was finally time to sell my golf clubs.  I cried and felt my heartbreak.  

I believe that letting go of my past will finally give me the freedom I need.  This freedom will bring me happiness.  In my heart, I know that clinging to my past and my golf is not helping me at all, it is stopping me moving forward and stopping me being free.  

I am trying to believe that a river runs through me. My entire experience of life flows through me, down my river.  Everything I think, feel, and do passes through, powered by the current of the river.

My emotions, my opinions, my sense of identity … my habits, diagnoses, and choices … they are no longer still or solid, no longer just sitting somewhere. They have been all brought to life, felt, and then I am allowing them one by one to just drift away.  My river is in a constant motion, it is naturally replaced with a revolving stream of my new experiences.

I cannot control what flows down my river.  The particular thoughts and feelings that show up on my surface are not mine.  I didn’t put them there and, in most cases, I did not even choose them. They are simply part of the flow of my life.

My thoughts and feelings don’t come from the world outside my river; they can’t. What flows down the river is born of the river. Life out there including my relationships, my job, my body, my failing health, or any circumstance at all, I cannot create or dictate any of these experiences.  My experience begins and ends within me.

I am not the contents of the river. I am what remains when everything had flowed through.  The contents of my river are in perpetual flux.  I am the only constant.  

The current of my river makes me more aware of life which is why moving forward is vital now.  Daily things that I witness do not stick anymore, I have nothing to avoid, nothing to fear, nothing to change and therefore nothing to chase away because this current of my river takes care of this for me.  

This is all fairly new to me because nobody told me that my life could work this way, so I found myself identifying with and latching onto what was flowing through me.  I would constantly say things like;

I had this thought

I don’t like this feeling

I should be different.  

I can’t believe that I did/said/thought/felt that.

It has taken me a little while to realize that my experience isn't me. It's just life expressing itself through me.  Now I let all this flow down my river making way for new and different expressions. 

I am learning fast to stop replaying what I did yesterday and to stop fixating on fears and worries about what will happen tomorrow. I have fixated and worried all my life.  

All of this has started to change now that I picture a river.  Seeing through my prior misunderstandings has started to change everything.  I have caught a glimpse of the resilient, health-affirming design of my future life, and pulled the cover off of the wellbeing that has always been there.  

Thinking back to secondary school and my fight with bulimia,  I was caught up in binging and purging, I was furiously treading water in my river without even realising it.  ‘Furiously’ because that looked like the only way I could survive.  Everything looked and felt important, personal, and meaningful. What I ate, when I ate, how life appeared within and around me.

I was trying to keep from drowning in my own anxieties and my own self destruction.  Flailing about, trying to force change in my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors was all I knew to do.

I didn’t realize, at that age, that life as I knew it was being created within me, moment to moment. Life wasn’t happening to me. I wasn’t feeling the effects of my past or my weight or some mental flaw that I believe that I possessed.

This has not branded me and I have let this flow away because it was a mere snapshot of my life. 

My river is constantly flowing so new fresh water is always coming,  I just need to focus upstream instead of down stream.