‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ – Lady Bracknell, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’
The rhythm of life is peculiar; the dance is not as predictable as I would prefer. I am not a lover of surprises, which makes my life consistently challenging; yet the very consistency of the unexpected should, one might have imagined, have equipped me by now for the sudden changes of pace, lurches to the left or right etc. Not so. In reality, alterations in tempo and direction require a recalibration of thought and attitude from me which I process more slowly than is always helpful and which sometimes I resist completely.
The delay in writing this blog post is a case in point. Another example is our recent eagerly anticipated Big Trip. Our schedule had intention, flow and balance; and while the world of dance would quite rightly have recognised it as a quick-step, there was a well-crafted beauty to the whole.
Before my eyes it spiralled away into something quite different and turned 27,000 miles of long distance travel into more than 35,000 miles of the same. My Dad, who many of you know had been in deteriorating health for over two years, with consummate timing slipped off on his own assured journey to heaven. I am enormously grateful to those who helped me travel back from just about the furthest possible distance on the planet to take my privileged place with my Mum, my sisters and my children in order to honour and remember him with both tears and laughter. I can tell you, without doubt, that it was a thoroughly worthwhile trip. The church was packed with friends, family and colleagues – one of whom came especially from Padua, Italy for the occasion. The recurring theme in testimonials was of Dad’s unwavering integrity and living faith; both things which he brought and breathed as invariably to his working environment as he did to his family life.
To step out of my dance into another, bigger programme of participants required a significant change of rhythm and a sensitive ear to the changing cadence of the accompanying tune. The inevitable lament combined with life-filled memories, unfettered thankfulness and wry smiles at evocative words which breathed life into half-forgotten old jokes, bringing them to life once more. The steps were new but proved not so difficult after all, and my feet managed the change of pace with very little stumbling.
That was just as well since, after a few days, it was time to return to the more familiar dance of my life which required reuniting with the husband in Canada. Leaving the familial dancers to navigate the new season in their own ways, I turned my face to the north and flew to Vancouver via the snow-sprinkled landscape of Calgary. There, I picked up a message that, apparently inspired by my father, my mother-in-law had taken the same journey during her sleep that very morning. The timing was poignant to the point of outrageous given the circumstances I had just left. There was a moment during which I truly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Like Jack Worthington, I wondered if I had shifted from unfortunate to careless… I had no travelling companion with whom to share the news, and since the communication included the important point that connection with my husband hadn’t yet ben made, I found myself horribly alone on my private stage with neither clue nor reference to either tune or steps. The dance wound down from surreal slow-motion to a total stand-still.
There have been other stand-stills in my life: an exam result that left me hanging in unfamiliar territory; a letter which I should never have sent; a university application that presented only a brick wall and bafflement; a broken relationship that I couldn’t fix; a bereavement I didn’t want to accept. Doubtless you can pinpoint such moments in your own dance; times when there is such a jarring of accompanying chords or such terrible silence filled only with your own uncertain breaths that you experience the chilling sensation that your whole body is seizing up. ‘Dancing Through Chaos’ is often my theme, but in the times when everything grinds to a shattering halt around you, even chaos beckons as a welcome relief. One cannot dance in a vacuum.
Poised and paralysed in that nether world of unreality and shock, without emotional handles to grab or physical hooks for stabilising focus, the inner, spiritual compass came to the fore once more. This has been operating in my life for just about as long as I can remember. Not a psychological mind-over-matter life-hack, but a foundational, relational, calibrating certainty; the living metronome of my dance who operates as smoothly, easily and unfailingly in all the varying movements of my unique, accompanying, composition of circumstances, whether a slow waltz or frenetic tango, a smooth foxtrot or a cheeky jive.
My faith is not based on a legal list of contractual demands; it is not the whimsical dream-world of an over-active imagination. On the contrary, it fizzes with the life I believe my Creator put into my being based on His blueprint which hasn’t changed through the millennia. It is about ‘He’, rather than ‘it’; the dance partner who leads me through and who, when everything vanishes and I am thrown well beyond my comfort zone, catches me with consummate care and accuracy.
So, those moments of stage-fright in Calgary dissipated in a fleeting moment and I chose to engage with my choreographer and dance-partner once more, to hold a steady gaze and allow my feet to find the sure steps ahead. Yes, there was sorrow – this is the real world not a cloister – but there was peace within my storm just as there can be in yours.
dancingthroughchaos 