Choose Life

I visualised myself as a house yesterday. These are the mental games I play with myself :) What I visualised was a long hallway. The floors are deep burnished wood. The ceilings are high. It is quite a dark hallway, yet punctuated with bursts of sunlight coming in quite dramatically, looking like it's been choreographed straight out of Six Feet Under :) Despite the openness of the house out the back and out the front, all along this hallway in the middle are rooms with closed doors. Some of these doors have never been opened. Ever. And yet it doesn't feel claustrophobic here in the hallway with the closed doors. It feels anticipatory. I yearn for them to open. I feel like God is preparing me for just such openings. It's almost too much to bear or believe.

Choose Life. For someone with an adventurous streak that ain't been exercised for nigh on a decade, it should be a cinch and an easy choose. It's not. Things atrophy when you don't use them. When I lay all those days, weeks and months on the couch, I would visualise myself off flinging madly around like a manic tampon commercial as soon as my health returned. It did not happen that way. It's been one of the more astonishing thing to me that a return to health has not automatically signified a resurrected life. I think I underestimated the shadow that remained after almost a decade of being either physically ill or emotionally flung over backwards (or both).

But now - now, it's starting to feel different. It almost feels like if I say that too loud, the whole house of cards will topple down. It's been so long coming, you see. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. And my heart has been much more ill than I realised. Broken quite badly. But there are glimmers everywhere, some that I have set in motion by my own hand, by the part of me that is much wiser and more knowing than the part of me which, sitting tired tonight, wants to quit and be unlife. I only slept for four hours last night, which is about half of what I need. My niggling inner self-flagellator relishes these opportunities, and is tempting me with despairing thoughts, trying to future trip me. I know that game and while I play it a lot, I don't wanna play it no more tonight.

Choose Life. Sometimes choosing life means doing the smallest things. I got a whole lot of candles off Freecycle the other day. Sometimes Freecycle is used by people who are too lazy to put their stuff in the dumpster. Other times you hit pay dirt. I got myself a plastic bag full of almost entirely white never-before-used candles, including a beesewaxer. Luxury. And they cost me nothing. White candles have become my candle of choice ever since I set up my workspace; somehow they began amassing themselves on my writing desk. Lighting a candle not only chases away the darkness but it clears my mind and soothes my soul. This is a present from God to me.

My flesh wants to live in the unlife. I want to live in the candlelight. Jane and I are going to go swimming in the sea in the dark on the weekend. Choose life. Choose life. Choose life. Sometimes you have to fight for it.