MY OWN WALKING - Journal January 2025

January 10th wears a shroud of significance, another month has passed. We've crossed the invisible threshold into another year, and now its six months since the HA! I do realise this is a milestone, but not sure how I'm expected to respond or feel about it. God, I feel so glad to be still alive. Grateful for this further opportunity to delve deeper into the experience of being alive. I appear to continue to be on the mend. Well, how would I know? I keep taking the pills, nothing untoward has happened, I guess that's proof of success. 

At the moment all this is a bit hard to discern. I am emerging out the other end of 'The Plague' coda to the heaviest of colds. You know, the one where the nose might've stop running, but what your left with is a constant wheezing cough, that sounds like your throat is lined with an impermeable glutinous gel, which in fact it is. This shows sign of improving one day, then worsens the next. Anyone would think this were a conditioned event!

My life, such as it was before the heart attack, well, it feels naive now. I existed on a constantly onward rolling horizon built on the dodgy foundations of misguided optimism. Yet now paradoxically, there is still the remnants of desire to go back to that era of perpetual forgetfulness of life being finite. To put it back to the top of the leader board of blind priorities, I am reticent to do that. I have far from fully processed the experience of how close the quick beats of my heart were to stopping. I look on incredulously at the possible return of the sunny optimism. I shake my head and mutter - have you not learned? I offer up praise to the stark reminder. Warily standing guard lest delusion takes hold again.

Life, my appreciation and thankfulness for it, has blossomed in an unexpected way since the HA! There is an aspiration at least to do whatever comes next differently. All without completely knowing what that might entail. Whatever I do, I don't want to slip back into absent mindedness, of how brief my time may be, even now. I want to keep the window open. The HA! was a premonition, an oracle of demise. But the date or the time of day is forever unknowable. I'm unconsciously operating on the basis of it not being now, tomorrow or anytime soon, even though I regularly remind myself it could be now, tomorrow, yeah, really soon. And in my own way, the urge to constantly return to express gratitude is one antidote to this. Just so long as I am grateful, then I remain fully alive to the vibrant possibility of the present. For that is all there is..