Freedom from Time
We do not suspect how intimately connected to time are our thoughts, emotions, and physical impulses, until our time is about to expire.
I knew a practitioner called Darsha who was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. This is a progressive neurological disorder that destroys the cells that control skeletal muscle activity such as walking, breathing, speaking, and swallowing. Full paralysis is inevitable, although the journey to this dysfunctional state can be agonizingly gradual. The muscles take their time to lose vitality, slowly retiring one by one, until motor ability is altogether lost.
Such was Darsha’s decline.
At first, she could no longer use her fingers to handle delicate objects while every other motor ability remained unimpaired. Then the lack of function spread from individual fingers to her hands. Later, she needed a cane to walk. Then a cane no longer sufficed and she had to rely on the assistance of others. Eventually, she was confined to a wheelchair. Yet despite this steady loss of her ability to move, Darsha’s other functions remained intact, proving that they were, in fact, independent functions. Her mental capacities remained as sharp, her emotional sensitivity and perceptiveness—if anything—only became more acute. We were seeing a person whose motor function was dying in isolation.
Darsha would slide two steps back and then take one forward again. At times she regained moving abilities she’d lost. At other times she seemed to be freefalling towards full paralysis. This required regular medical checkups. It also kept her friends off balance. Sometimes we naively imagined we would enjoy her company for the foreseeable future. At other times, a sudden decline seemed to be a warning that she was hastening towards death.
One of Darsha’s routine checkups alarmed her doctors. Her vital signs were more abnormal than expected. She was rushed through a series of more thorough tests and these showed even more concerning results. After consulting specialists in the field, the physician returned to deliver the news: Darsha’s end was near.
She had, at the most, one more week to live.
Darsha returned home and arranged to say her goodbyes to her relatives and friends. She met with them one by one, bidding them farewell. She made a careful inventory of her possessions and noted to whom they should be given after her death. How touching it is to witness a person bring their life to an intentional close! Without bitterness or fear, without any sense that things should have gone differently, Darsha shook hands with the cast of actors that had accompanied her throughout her play. The last act was about to end and the curtain was about to fall. I could plainly see her inner clarity in our farewell encounter. Her time was about to expire, and with it, all the cogs put in motion by time were quite irrelevant.
A month later, however, Darsha was still with us. She was still in need of assistance, still fumbling about her house and still doing her best to maintain it, given her physical challenges. I was called to assist—as I had been called several times before—and it was then that she told me this story.
“Have you seen your doctors since the test results,” I inquired? “Oh yes,” she replied with a measure of cynicism. “They’ve removed the imminent death prognosis. My vital signs are back to what they had been before and I’m no longer about to die. They couldn’t explain what happened. They consider it a medical miracle—but here’s what’s interesting,” she said.
“When I was told I had a week to live, I was overcome by a clarity I had never experienced before. All the daydreams, all the plans and concerns that populate our inner landscape, packed up and left me. But once I was told the prognosis was wrong and I was given more time, they all returned.”