TRUTH . . . IS ESTABLISHED IN ADVERSITY
(continued)

Two months later, while sitting in a Canterbury restaurant with Eileen and a visiting friend from Florida, I found I could not hold myself erect nor move the left side of my body. It was evident I had suffered a stroke and I was soon stretchered off to hospital. Unable to move about under my own steam I needed a month in the recovery ward and finally home visits meant being pushed around the village in a wheelchair. Used to seeing me about in running gear, the locals thought I had fallen over while out training. I found I had so much to cope with that I had no spare energy to worry about other people, not even for my close family who had always been the constant targets of my worrying disposition. Strangely enough this attitude continued and once discharged I found it relatively easy to dismiss worrying thoughts as perverse and uninvited guests. I didn't resist them, but smiled and watched them pass me by. I concentrated on getting mobile again and really began to understand what hard work was. When I overtook my first human being - a very old lady dragging a shopping trolley! - it was to me the equivalent of an Olympic gold medal.

Intrusive thoughts did not give up easily, they had received a welcome for too long. But this was another day. 'I am not a worrier' I told myself, 'Just plagued with unwanted worrying thoughts'. (If you are tempted to think this is mere semantics, that I play with words, please believe me these words made a great difference to my enjoyment of living.) You see, I just did not own these invasive thoughts. This was not the well advertised Power of Positive Thinking with all the strain of striving to remember to think correctly and say the right words. I was not whistling in the dark. I knew what I was saying was the truth. These unwanted worries did not originate in the deepest and holiest part of my being, they were not what I really wanted or believed.

Easily persisting with this truthful attitude I continued to let any negative destructive thoughts slip past me. Let me repeat, I did not resist unwanted thoughts or distressing feelings in my body, for I knew by bitter experience that what we resist persists. Like a reed bending in the wind I suppose, if it resisted the force it would snap.

If I failed, then I accepted the pain this inevitably brought. This quiet acceptance obviously stopped the flow of any further adrenalin and anxieties subsided. Lessons I had read about long ago, in the valued writings of the saintly doctor Claire Weekes, began to pay off and I was learning to undo the habits of a lifetime.

I now realise how often severe adversity can change our perspective by giving us no alternative but to focus on the present moment. I don't promise never to worry again, but I feel quietly confident I will be living on a different level. And the demon of Worry has been exposed, not as a constant winner but as a fraud, and his beloved adversity turned to my advantage.

© Maurice Smith 2004

//Continued