Don't Look Back!

I had a bit of a wake-up call the other night. I awoke at about 12:30 a.m. feeling exceedingly ill. I don’t know whether it was something I’d eaten, or just a strange bug that I’d picked up, but I got out of bed and for the next five hours I was subjected to horrible poisonous bile being forcibly projected from every orifice of my body. Every time I collapsed back into my sweat-soaked bed, I fell into a fevered delirium for a few moments before having to jump up again and rush once more for the bathroom. It was exhausting, painful and debilitating. By morning, although the vomiting etc. had ceased, I was so weak I could barely stand.

My friend Dharmachari Jinaraja, from the Buddhist Centre, came round and took me out for a slice of toast and a cup of tea. It took me half an hour to nibble away at the toast fearing, as to be expected, that it wouldn’t stay down for long. Luckily, it did – but I was so weakened by the effort that I had to come home and sleep for the next six hours. I finally felt sufficiently recovered to hold a book for long enough to read (just a couple of hours) and then managed to find enough energy to change my stained and tousled bedding before slumping down again. A fitful night of anxiety, hallucinations, restlessness and panic thereby followed, so that by this morning I was almost ready to stab myself.

However, I won’t do that. Instead, I aim to embark on a new programme of healthy endeavour and industrious pursuits. Yes, I know you’ve heard this before, but I’ve never felt this close to death before (except, perhaps, for the time when I was caught in a tornado off the mango swamps of Norfolk, or maybe the time when my car broke down, as night was falling, on the deserted barren road on the wrong side of Mount Teide in Tenerife), so I feel it’s now time for a re-appraisal of my life.

I’ve been so swamped recently by the things I have to do, that it has paralysed me into doing very little at all. So today, apart from attending to a few essential and urgent actions, I am going to write down all the tasks that are awaiting completion and then put them into an order of priority (in terms of importance versus urgency). Then I am going to draw up a timetable and allocate specific hours in the day for getting these tasks achieved. Understandably I do not see, in that timetable, great blocks being set aside for lounging around the Broadway – although there might be a chance for the odd ‘free period’ to appear. We’ll see.

Everything is impermanent and we haven't a moment to waste. Jinaraja told me yesterday that: "Your death is as certain as the man's who already has the knife thrust into his heart". A sobering thought indeed. So my friends, as ever, it is onwards and upwards. There’s nothing like being slain by a temporary illness for sharpening the mind and (strangely) for lifting the spirits. Tally ho!