My Road To Damascus
I wasn’t literally on the road to Damascus, nor is it an exact comparison to what happened to me or how I felt — but it signalled a similarly momentous change in me.
I had just endured three years of tumultuous, almost continuous, serious misfortunes. Of all shapes and sizes as it happens and of varying importance and all serving to bring me down another notch or two on the dangerous, slippery path into homelessness and helplessness in this unrelenting slide. I felt as if a malicious hand must be conducting an orchestra of malcontented musicians who were there to deliberately drown out my pleas for help. Practically, no matter how hard I tried to dig my heels in and stop the fall, nothing worked, great or small. I was confounded at every turn standing on the brink of a fatally steep precipice. Incomprehensible to me that my most determined efforts yielded little and were never enough to regain normality for any extended period.
Literally, when I thought I had no choice but to concede the battle with all those implications, my endurance ebbing away, fate or destiny stepped in and slowly but certainly placed the precise offers and opportunities right in front of me like a tray of jewellery from which I could take my pick. A benevolent god was offering me not only handholds and stepping stones towards an immediate and different trajectory but one which miraculously and exactly fulfilled my silently longed for resolution.
“There will be a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning”, this pertinent quote by Louis L’Amour reflected precisely where I was literally, physically and emotionally — apparently out of options or opportunities to wrestle my life back into shape. And then out of the blue, blank, blueness of an empty horizon, my sky, my world, was suddenly awash with gifts of professional work and opportune meetings with acquaintances I hadn’t seen in years. All of my stars colluding and colliding in an almost magical meteorite shower to answer my several needs and dilemmas. Solutions suddenly at my finger tips as hands reached out to help me. What was once an unrelenting nightmare to be lived daily now dissolving into dust in the daylight, disappearing as quickly as it had come. Suddenly, my universe righted itself everything slotting easily into place; a naturally exact fit, tailor-made for me alone, filling all my urgent needs and wishes.
Even though my perilous journey was clearly finished, giving me a sense of overwhelming relief as well as disbelief that it was really over, I still continued to feel slightly numb, not exactly doubting but wary, sticky vestiges of flight or fight clinging to me. But recently driving my car to accomplish a more prosaic errand than Saul’s journey, a sudden rush of exhilaration and awareness flooded my mind and body, a physical jolt of overwhelming well-being: I felt as if I had been returned to myself; as if my real personality had been missing; as if the real me — the happy, confident, optimistic, creative, energetic woman I used to be whom I thought to be long-gone — unreachable, perhaps lost forever or dead inside me — was now anchored back in place.
Simultaneously in that precipitous moment of piercing illumination I released my burdened, unidentifiable self trudging wearily through difficulties on leaden feet. Instead of a dearth of solutions my immediate horizon became a vista of unlimited, enlightened opportunities — a lake of shining dreams instead of dark puddles, appearing as an emerging reality. This was mine to embrace. This was my revelation on the road to Damascus.
