CHANGE WITHOUT TRYING

This doesn’t happen often, at least not to me; a monumental change occurring without preparation, without struggle, without trying. But it has happened to me. I’ve had three heart operations that have caused a major change in me. The change was nothing I asked for not something I consciously decided to make happen. It was caused primarily from the effects of having my heart stopped for awhile and put on a pump while the doctors worked on it.

What has happened is this: Some of what I knew has disappeared—it’s gone, forgotten. The world looks different now. I have been given a new beginning, a clean slate. It is a wondrous state to be in. It feels like I’m standing on a mountaintop filling my lungs with dry alpine air. The air clears the mind. Many of my old, worn habits have inexplicably faded. Things that seemed so important and had become so ingrained in the part of me called my past no longer exist—I don’t even remember what those things were. It’s as if I’d been looking at a pane of glass but not seeing through it. Someone has taken a rag and a bottle of Windex and wiped away years worth of grime. Suddenly the window’s clean—perfectly clear. I forget that the glass is even there at all because now I’m looking way past where I was before, much farther, seeing the rays of the sun light up the snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Problems that once overwhelmed me have suddenly shrunk to bite size. I can deal with them and even look forward to dealing with them because I know there’s nothing I can’t handle.

I’ve inherited a whole new vision—one in which the world is a more peaceful place filled with poetry and art and music and people are all at one. Maybe it’s a dream in which I’ve awakened. Sometimes I think I’m seeing the world the way it should be, rather than the way it is.