Game On

A troubling fear in the days before my surgery was that much of this ordeal provided a convenient excuse to avoid the more serious crisis of how to live the rest of my life. As long as surgery loomed and the catheter was an impediment, I could sit here quietly and always plead my health.

Repaired, I have to face squarely my disillusionment with construction and disappointment with the financial results of my insurance effort. Unable and unwilling to live on my father’s allowance, I have to find a viable income to hold my head high.

Fear suggests that the delay last year was a sub-conscious ploy to avoid the confrontation. Without a solid plan for afterwards, it is possible, I imagine, I might have sabotaged the paperwork to create the time to figure it all out.

While the case strikes home, I am quick to find as much evidence of my desire to be truly healed. Within weeks of the shock of having to cancel the surgery, I submitted close to one hundred resumes last summer. Without much opportunity offered back, I settled with full intention on selling the insurance, making thousands of calls and driving easily as many miles, but pitched largely to people who understood the value of what I offered, but were finding it a challenge just to make the rent.

Now the mantle is cast off (so to speak) and nothing holds me back. Physically, they warned me that it would be a slow recovery and not to be surprised to still need resting time each day in August. Awakening from the surgery with amazing clarity, however, I walked the hospital corridor several times the very next day because it felt right; with caution, there was no good reason to stay in bed.

The first day home, I climbed the stairs to the sidewalk, and feeling okay after a few steps, took more and more until I reached the Dunkin Donuts a half mile away. A ride back home would have been appreciated, but I made it, each step a little slower, and rested the remainder of the day in celebration.

Once finally free of the catheter, I have enjoyed a wholeness of body, a lightness of being, beyond comprehension. Activities as simple as getting out of the car are dances to new music. A more serious regimen of yoga compliments my meditations and limbers my extremities. With legs moving freely, my arms swing more strongly, my stride lengthens and I can walk much faster and farther each morning.

Unhampered by straps and tubes restraining my impulses, I find myself not wanting to put on clothes at all.

With the excitement of such fluidity, I attack my need for income with determination, but no matter the agenda, I end up working hard on written words. My book manuscript is completed and submitted to numerous agents and publishers; already in receipt, in fact, of its first rejection. I educate myself on the merits of self-publishing. Several sections are easily reduced to articles relevant to different markets and a website is discovered that lands me copy-writing assignments at an insultingly low rate, but income with words nevertheless.

Resting in between, I contemplate the education received this month in a series of webinars about creating a business out of the passion in our life, the true calling for our time on this earth. I consider my writing, supplemented by the music, infused with the valuable lessons learned in these years of transformation. Resumes are still going out to interesting variations for the uses of my skill-sets, but the bulk of my time is in pursuit of marketing scribbles, the one urge so consistently prevalent throughout all the years of my struggling life.

My goal by the end of the summer was to go to my pick-up soccer friends and kick a ball around with them as they warmed up to play. I had no expectation of joining the game until next spring. Last week, I showed up to watch and this week in bare feet, I came across a ball and kicked it a bit just to feel the solid connection as cool as no clothes against my skin.

Yesterday, I arrived at the park with cleats just for some better kicks and the Greek national team shirt, a treasured gift of a friend, I was wearing in my last game just a few days before the fall off the scaffold. My pals of so many years, not even sure of each other’s names, were glad to see me. They encouraged me to be cautious, but joked I could do well to lose a few pounds.

Once they began to play, I watched from the sideline, kicking, kneeing and heading a ball by myself to stay moving, but yearning to join just as I had viewed the corridor from my hospital bed. It was not long before I drifted in to guard the goal, two shoes thrown down. The first pass back to me and my embarrassingly under-kicked redirect brought cheers from them just a little less than for Jeter on his 3000th hit, but feeling perfectly grand to me.

For an hour, I jogged and scrambled, hanging back there, growing braver as the muscles came alive. My feet had lost little and seemed to be gaining back much more. My pals joked, after a good stick and take-away, that they would have to stop playing it easy on me; be as tough as I deserved.

Having healed so much, I go forward this morning, happily aching and a little bruised in body, resolved in mind to have the life I have always wanted and deserved.

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