There are no verbs
Trying to put into words the experience of yesterday, without resorting to a kind of technical dryness that is inappropriate, there were no words.
In the night I held my belly, as I do, and noticed it is flabby and therefore wrong. And noticed that I have been doing this holding and judging my belly since I was a teenager when the fat there was barely two cells thick. And where has that got me? As if judging my belly fat could ever lead to anything good. I fell back to sleep, amused that I had kept up the pretence that my thoughts were in charge for forty years.
I woke in the morning with the feathers of fear stroking my throat and heart. A new class starting today, a new group of people I didn't know, my judges. What if my suspicions were right and one of them was going to be intensely annoying and would have to be 'handled'? What if they all hated me and left to tell each other how bad I was at my job?
I didn't want to get caught up in the fear, I know too well where that leads. And I didn't want to suppress it with my will. I know I can, but that's when it erupts at the worst moments, as if on purpose to shame me. I was afraid of being overtaken by fear. But knew I had no chioce but to trust that it would work out, so I let it go.
Eating my toast and peanut butter, among the floating thoughts was the memory of my patient satisfaction survey. I hadn't thought about it at all for twenty years.
It was part of my specialist training as a young doctor to do some research and as I was working at a day hospital I did a little satisfaction survey of all the people at all the groups there. Not for the first time I discovered that almost everyone, however ill, was kind and patient with me. That almost everyone, however paranoid or deluded, anxious or angry, thought the day centre did a good job.
But the thing that most surprised me from the experience was that while most people are satisfied, the people who are not are almost always the same people. There were two who were responsible for almost all the dissatisfied scores in the whole group.
So the conclusion to be drawn from this was that:
Patient satisfaction surveys don't tell you about the service. They tell you about the individuals responding to it.
I finished my pot of tea and left for my meditation group filled with curiosity about who I would be meeting. And grateful for whatever luck or unconscious or whatever had brought the survey to my attention at exactly the moment I needed it.
The group went well and I loved their quirkiness, and the way they responded to mindfulness with pleasure. We were all delighted by the simplicity of the long-suffered tension falling away.
As I left on my bike, mats and cushions in the paniers, I was happy. My heart was open, and the park and streets were fizzing with liveliness that lasted for the rest of my day. And all from that trust, that letting go of the morning, that I didn't really have any authorship of. The helpful thought that floated by when I stopped trying to help myself.
Trying to describe the experience of the day I find there are no words. The words we have and the way we put them together, the grammar even, are from a different perspective. I am aware that writing this down in sentences here is ironic. But also that it might mislead you into thinking I am talking about some otherworldly, 'spiritual' experience when I am not. I am not trying to describe being a spirit or angel or part of God or something like that. I am looking for the words to describe what it is like to be a not-trying human. A non-doing in the flow of the River Human.
This is what emerged when I woke this morning, back in the verb world, trying and failing to use words to show how it was in the park yesterday. And still is, despite these misleadinging words, this misleading grammar:
There are no verbs here
No decide
No try
No make it happen
Not even any surrender
Verbs need subjects, and there are no subjects
There are no objects here either
No self apart
No bike apart
No trees apart
No winding path apart
No me and you apart
Nothing apart
There are no verbs or nouns here, only adjectives
There is sparkling, alive
There is childlike, joyful
There is playful
There is plaaaaaaaay-ful
And the adjective behind the adjectives,
The adjective under them all that makes them safe, is
Loved
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