I’m ready to go now

I’m ready to go now.

Those were the words I spoke out loud as I lay in bed, wondering if it was time to catch the express to the great beyond.  My affairs were in order, I had detached from my material possessions, I knew where I was going and who would meet me.  I had gone through a powerful process of separation from worldly affairs, things, people.  Nothing really mattered anymore, and the things that once did now seemed laughingly absurd.

Illness can be a strange thing.  At its worst it can be terrifying, at its best liberating.  I had experienced both, coupling a potentially fatal heart condition with a stripping away of aspects of my personality, a process which had taken place over several months.  This resulted, as the illnesses I experience always seem to, in a realignment of my psychospiritual values and a purging of my mind.  I had made my peace with the world and with myself, and I was ready to go.

But I didn’t go.  And this isn’t the first time I didn’t go when I thought I was going to.  But then, truth be told, who really knows when it is time to go?

I had a lot of time for reflection during my illness.  There wasn’t much else I could do, because for a large part of it I was consigned to bed with extremely limited mobility.  Endless rounds of visiting doctors and specialists and having to undergo a multitude of tests and discussions of results became my new norm.  My world, which had been a socially active one, gradually shrank until I was its only inhabitant.

But now things are different.  My heart is healing, my revisioned world gently expanding, my mind renewed, and my way of being in the world, different once again.