Chaos

This was one of the first words I learnt to spell because my sister said it would impress my teacher. It did. Little did I realise how much that word was going to play an important role in my life’s journey, but avoiding it became a major project for me.

Turning the clock back in review, I see that the chaos was all around Mum and Dad when they did the deed that resulted in me.  Dad had been away on bomb damage in London, picking up the pieces after the blitz as a member of the Home Guards. He was drafted there as a result of an accident he had had on a building site where a crane fell on him, almost completely scalping him. Thanks to his mate, who picked up the scalp and slapped it back on his head immediately, Dad lived. But the scaring that remained around the rim of his scalp made it impossible to wear hard hats. God knows how he gat around it clearing up bombed buildings but there you go. Mum had been left in Suffolk, where they lived, looking after refugees, also from London homes, for the duration of the war. The story goes that she was about to leave him when he came home and low and behold, I became what Mum referred to as the deliberate mistake. You can imagine the work I have had to do around that one, but that’s not the story.

1947: rationing, homecomings, welcome or not, traumatized demobed soldiers, women reluctant to give up their hard-earned freedoms to let the ‘blokes’ have the jobs back that they had been diligently keeping the country going with for the duration. Poverty: all the country’s money had gone onto the war effort. And I didn’t want to be there! Mum had had a breached birth that nearly invalided her 13 years earlier and was told never to have another child, and I didn’t want that child to be me. But arrive I had to. 32 hours it took them to get me out and then I rejected my mother’s milk. I couldn’t breathe for her internalized fear, and they took me somewhere for three days before bringing me back to her. Not the ideal mother/baby bonding time, but we managed.

I was a bonny, cheeky, happy little creature nevertheless, but at the age of 3, brought down by the London smog’s,  I started the exit. In and out of various hospitals, plied with all the going new drugs to see what they would do, I felt like a pin cushion as well as a guinea pig. But they hung onto me. I learnt recently that a doctor told my sister, who was in her 20’s about then, that he didn’t think I wanted to live. He was partially correct. It wasn’t a particularly alluring way to live. And I was lonely. Hospitals are not hospitable.

At the age of 8yrs the crunch came. In a separate room from the main children’s ward, I had my NDE. Now I have been unconscious many times in this process, waking up with nurses holding my hands and doctors hovering over me. But this time I didn’t wake up. I did, however, become conscious that I was heading out down a long dark tunnel, and knew suddenly I didn’t want to go there, despite the difficulties that lay ahead. Obviously, I didn’t think like that then. I just didn’t want to go any further down, where that tunnel was taking me. So, I turned myself around and, what I remember as dogpaddling, back to the surface and life. No shining light at the end of that tunnel. No angels there to greet me. Just darkness. I probably hadn’t gone far enough. I hope.

But the decision was made. Somehow, I had to create order out of this cacophony that was my life. I was here for the duration. The fallout of this came not long after I was able to go back to school. I felt so insecure that I could not stop crying. The school sent me home, but no one there understood what was happening to me. I was having a nervous breakdown. Kids, indeed, post war, adults themselves, didn’t have nervous breakdowns. Eight-year-olds are supposed to be happy-go-lucky rose faced beings with dirty faces. I was a scared skinny, underweight kid nobody wanted to play with. So, I had to create my own order out of this mess.

In my mind, the whole thing hung on the fact that I needed Mum and Dad to look after me. All kids know this instinctively, but for me it was an absolute imperative. Mum had once said that her lucky number was 6. I started, what today we would call affirmations, praying that they would live a long life and not leave me. And I would do it 6 times. But addictions love repetitions and are never satisfied with one or two. I quickly found myself using everything I did to affirm their wellbeing. In 6’s. Then in multiples of 6. Now it was getting unwieldy. People were noticing and staring at me, so I got covert, pretending I was doing something else.

One day Mum came out with it. In effect she told me I needed to stop this, or I would go mad. In actual fact, though I did not know it, it was death that I was more afraid of, but the shock hit home. I got very clever at not being seen. As I grew up, I sort of grew out of it. It became a trait of overt neatness. Everything having a place, and horror if anything was out of their assigned one. I also became very efficient, leaving no loose ends and unfinished business. By the time I was an adult, these traits served me well. They came with huge benefits business-wise, with time saving built in. But they left me with a subconscious drive to finish everything I started. While my outward life worked my inner insecurity continued to get in the way.

Then I discovered Psychosynthesis, the psycho-spiritual training of Roberto Assagioli that insisted on personal growth as a requisite for professional practice. In other words, “practice what you preach”. It was transformational for me. In a session with my trainer one day the memory, that I had completely suppressed, of my NDE surfaced and I began to understand where my fears came from. I learnt the skills, applied them to myself, and grew. I never questioned my efficiency, tidiness, and desire to complete things I started because they were so beneficial. I realised that I was still ‘a bit OCD’ as I laughed it off, realizing that lots of people are, still having the odd foible crop up when I was under pressure. None of this was huge in the greater scheme of things. We are none of us perfect, and I have used my imperfections to help others, assuring them that they too, can grow and gain the skills to cope.

A while ago I was laying in bed before sleep, feeling a knot of anxiety in my solar plexus. It is not uncommon and began during menopause, so I was just about to turn over and ignore it when a voice in my head told me to walk my talk. With a tired sigh I closed my eyes, and just as I get my clients to do, I breathed into the feeling. I didn’t have to wait long. Up she popped. The little girl half-way down the dark tunnel of death, so scared of what was in front of her that she was frantically turning her body around to do the famous (in my mind) dogpaddle back to consciousness. What was she most scared of, I asked her. Things going wrong, because they can lead to dying, she said. And then I fell asleep.

But there she was on waking, front and center of my consciousness and I began to understand my life-long imperative to fix things, to make sure things were tidied up, to leave nothing outstanding that could turn to chaos, because chaos is death. But it’s not. Chaos is restructuring. It’s the stirring up of existing structures, from physical, to psychological, to make way for new upgraded order to evolve. And yes, it does bring to an end a way of life, making way for a new one. There is another name for that. It’s called change. We can’t live without it, as it’s built into the system, allowing forward motion to continue on the Arrow of Time. It can be bloody uncomfortable but its not the end. Nothing is. Life continues to shapeshift, in us and around us.

So, it was time for me to go back to her with a few updates for her understanding and to thank her for the new life and skills she instigated in me in the years following that fateful day. I breathed into that space with her and took her hand I told her she was not alone and that she did the right thing. I showed her the life we had had and that there was no longer any need to be afraid of change because we survived, and here we are. As we always will.

But now was a different time. I was reminded recently of the Greek story of Tithonus. A goddess fell in love with him and petitioned Zeus to give him eternal life. Zeus agreed, but the goddess forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. As a result, he could never die, aging into bones and wrinkled skin as she stayed lovely, and cursed her for her unthinkingness. Not a good look. Its all very well for the hypocratic oath to promise to keep us alive, but there is a price to pay. If you can be bothered to read it, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about this myth by the same name. It’s an interesting perception. So I explained to her that we were on that road together now, and rather than running from death, we must proceed gracefully towards it as Death means us no harm, protecting us from a fate worse than it. She saw my points, holding my hand and walking beside me as we slowly journeyed towards our transformation.

I have been investigating Death a lot in the last issue or too. Please don’t get the idea that I am planning on going anywhere just yet. Contemplating my transition into a being of energy and a bag of bones, is preparation for the inevitable.

However, my family average life expectancy is in their 90’s, most often 94, so no doubt I will be scaring the pants of you with my contemplation's for some time yet. There is a moral to this story. If you think that there is no more that you can possibly benefit from by going deeper into your self-processing, your wrong. There is always more. And each bit that you find, informs your daily life in ways you could possibly imagine before to found it. At the age of 76 I am now a good deal less OCD than I have ever been 😉