disturbance

For the past few months, I go to the pool every day. Swimming is the priority. By the time I drive along the coast to get there, and then back again, half an hour in the water takes two hours from my day.

In February I woke up with a sore leg. Which lingered. A month later I went to the physio who came up with a theory and prescribed exercises.

A few weeks after that, still hobbling, a small incident sent me to an emergency clinic. While walking from my front door to the restaurant just a few feet away, my neighbour’s door swung open which startled me. (My neighbour died a year ago.) I did not trip or fall, but the startle sent a jolt through my shoulders and then torched a searing pain through my right knee. I found myself instantly crippled.

I choked on tears as my leg refused to take weight. It buckled with each ounce I forced it to take. As I stood there wondering how to move, my neighbour’s door swung open again. Out came a frazzled woman. Not a ghost. Just a relative who had run into the house to turn off an alarm. She didn’t know what to make of me standing there.

The next morning, a friend delivered crutches. I got myself to a clinic. And a week or so later, a doctor pointed to an MRI on his screen, his finger circling a large white patch. Spontaneous osteonecrosis, sudden death of the bone, he said. Most people recover, he said. In six to twelve months. Which reminded me of March 2020 when someone said this lockdown could last a year. Initially, these timeframes seemed impossible.

I came home after the diagnosis and made a list of what I would need to live through a long spell on crutches. Find a pool. Get a cleaner. Click and collect groceries.

The word disturbance connotes an unwelcome wrongness. Since the thirteenth century disturb has meant “to frighten, alarm, break up the tranquility.”

The Latin disturbare means “throw into disorder.”

But the root of the word, tumult, relates to the Latin verb tumēre: to be excited.

Dis (utterly) turba (tumult) – a sudden noise that excites.

In July last year I blogged about my tendency to become strict with my focus – how I operate in a daily tunnel to get all the work done. How it’s difficult for me to remember that the day’s interruptions may be of more value, more tied to a Whole Life, than what I had planned.

Even though I desperately miss my morning walks, I have always wanted to be a swimmer. Until now I found the effort of changing clothes, getting wet, drying off, putting yourself back together again, way too laborious. And anyway, I wasn’t convinced I’d ever achieve the grace of the sort of swimmer I’d love to be.

But these days as I enter a silence that is water, I think about Parker Palmer’s expression Let Your Life Speak.

In his book by that name, Parker finds himself lost. He doesn’t know what to do with his life so he heads for the woodlands and birdsong of a Quaker retreat. Here he joins others in daily prayer, shares the kitchen rota, and engages in contemplative practices such as pottery. As he makes clunky clay mugs, Palmer hopes God will speak, steer him to a vocation.

During his time there, fellow residents console him with the well-meaning Quakerism: “have faith, and way will open.”  But after months of introspection, this way-opening eludes him. He seeks out an elder to share his woes. After listening, she replies that she too, has never in her sixty-odd years, experienced way opening. Palmer’s spirits collapse – until a moment later, when she gives a gentle smile and tells him that “a lot has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

Every disturbance – large and small, hopes to interrupt where you’re headed. It’s just life saying, Stop. Let’s go this way instead.

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