SOMETHING TO DECLARE

A comment by Jean in response to my post about anticipated problems with my sarcoidosis condition got me thinking. I hope she won’t mind my reproducing it here so that I can provide some kind of response. 

Dick, I'm sorry to hear this: both your health concerns and the decision to put the blog on hold. I send you all my best wishes for the health issues. But I also want to say: I wonder why you're doing this? Because you need more time and space and fewer commitments for a while as you deal with a difficult time? Fine. But if it is at all because you hesitate to share distress or sadness, I wish you wouldn't hesitate - I think that writers who do so give us all a great gift, expressing experiences shared by all at some time or other, but which only a few can adequately convey. The creative source, the words: this is, after all, something that, wonderfully, doesn't necessarily require full physical health, isn't it?

I’m not by nature one to bear all publicly. Frank confession, dramatic revelation and trumpet-blowing are not front line features here. Cosmopolitan I may try to be; English I remain! And fortunately one of the beauties of blogging is in the delicate balance that one can maintain between self-presentation and the cerebral.

But whatever the nature of that balance, a sense of common cause and fellow feeling is what motivates the interaction between bloggers. There will be, at the least, a seepage of data from even the most tight-lipped of writers and with those a little more ready to transmit the odd signal or two, much will go inferred by a reader on the same general wavelength.

In her comment on my post anticipating grim times ahead on medication, Jean hoped that I wasn’t hesitating to share distress or sadness because writers who are ready to communicate something of their pain are expressing experiences shared by all at some time or another, but which only a few can adequately convey. And it’s a point well made and well taken: bulletins from those at full stretch - whether sinking Lethewards through melancholia and hemlock, commentating on the inability to accommodate bereavement, or recording with dignity and restraint the ravages of terminal illness – are a staple of world literature. They constitute a major contribution both to our awareness of the commonality of suffering and our understanding of the human condition.   

I’m afraid I have neither the literary skill nor the forensic objectivity necessary (even at my shallow extreme of the suffering spectrum) for the exercise and, in the event, I would have ducked and run.  However, Jean made me reflect beyond the immediate issue in question and I ended up cataloguing the most fundamental verities that drive my life forward.

...

I FEAR... death through disease or disability. I have now, for the first time in my life, a powerful sense of my mortality. The unquestioned certainty of existential permanence that, for the child, renders time elastic has evaporated. That property of memory in age that has the perception of the passage of 20 years as having been fleeting so that one has perfect recall now of an event in the first year of the first decade ‘as if it were yesterday’ is now a characteristic of my future view. The next two decades will pass in a flash and this moment of writing now here upon this bank and shoal of time may be recalled at its end ‘as if it were yesterday’. I am now acutely conscious of my fragility. With my children around me with all before them, there are times outside the moment when this haunts me.   

I KNOW... that the sun rises and sets and that day is followed by night. I know who I love. I know that they love me. I know that there are certain unimpeachable moral absolutes concerning the sanctity of life from earliest childhood to the very end. I know that death is the final event. I can think of nothing else that I know for sure.

I FEEL... as passionately engaged with the processes of life as ever I did in youth. But whilst I may feel as emotionally committed to those issues and beliefs that activated me when I was younger, I feel them now in balance with a degree of wry circumspection.

I NEED... as much time here as inner health and outer circumstance will permit. I need to be, for as long as is possible, an active agent within the equation of love and mutual dependency that drives family. And besides, there is so much still to be done.

And yet, for all my hopes for future endurance, I need powerfully to disengage myself from both past and future as the principal determinants of present functioning. I need to locate that which will enable me to live fully in the moment, untrammelled by fear of what may lie ahead. Even as it unreels, time itself must lose its potency. I recognise that this breaking of allegiance to the great driving force behind Western existential consciousness requires a falling away, an abandonment, a relinquishing. I need to realise how that can be achieved and sustained.

I WANT... strength and capacity, physical and mental, to carry me through substantially undiminished into great age. I want humour and compassion to direct my actions and reactions up to the end.