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| Image credit: Photo by mindfulness on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
When I was about eight or nine, I took my beloved uncle's cigarettes away and started flushing them down the toilet. I didn't want him to die prematurely (as he did anyway). Even as a child, I was sure that if I showed him how desperately I did not want him to kill himself, he'd stop. He never did. I wanted that change to somehow be within my power, yet it was completely out of my control. Sometimes death comes before change...
When I was trying to have children, I feared I wouldn't be able to get pregnant. And once I was pregnant, I was so very afraid that I would die. Or that the baby would die. Or both. And sometimes, even with modern medical interventions, those things do happen, which made it all the scarier. It seemed to be within my reach to control it, and yet it was completely out of my control. Sometimes death comes before that new life arrives.
That child I was, flushing cigarettes down the toilet, wanted Change to come before death. That woman I was, urinating on a thousand sticks and eating organic foods and monitoring every movement, wanted Life to come before death. And fear - the real possibility that Change or Life might not make it - haunted every moment. What if that little embryo never forms? What if it never makes it through the gestation process? What if it never comes or never lives or never grows?
The last few years have been a slow process of letting go of that fear. It's true, that people may not change in time to save themselves from death or me from pain. I may not change in time to save myself or others. It's true that people die and get hurt and suffer: children and parents and people who never will be parents. But I can't control that. I can't control whether or not Change or Life forms. I can't control the length of that gestation process necessary for it to emerge, with lungs ready to take that first breath — and cry. I can't control when death comes and the chances end.
And that's definitely scary. But holding tight to that desperate desire to control the outcome led, not to a life free from that pain I feared, but to the pain itself. When I feel compelled to flush a figurative cigarette down the toilet, I remember I have to wait for Change to gestate and let go of the fear that it may never come.
This post originally published at The Second Road.
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