Welcome to Living a Life of Gratitude.
I'm Sarah Wiseman.
My father's gift.
It's 48 hours before my surgery and I'm trying to quell the rising panic.
So much is unknown.
Is the melanoma cleared?
Am I safe?
Am I whole?
Will my life continue as I planned?
Or the other deeper,
Darker spiral that I try to keep my mind from going to?
Am I sick?
Has the cancer spread?
And at the very worst,
Am I dying?
The fear has caught on my shoe like a burr attaches to a shoelace on an afternoon hike in the woods.
It's there,
Stuck fast to everything.
It's hard to pry off this fear.
It catches on the fibers of my shoelace and when I try to pull it free,
The stickers are so tiny,
So microscopic,
They burrow into my fingers as well.
I can hardly shake them off my hand,
Let alone my shoe.
I'd like to detach from this fear,
Dispose of it,
But it keeps showing up again.
I'll get rid of it for a while,
Then I look down and there it is nagging at my heel and I realize that this is the lesson that I am learning now.
How to live without fear,
Regardless of outcome.
And I realize that this is also the lesson I have been circling around my entire life.
My terror at learning to swim,
My panic in learning to ride a bike,
My anxiety at starting school,
My fear of,
My fear of everything that is new,
Different,
Bad,
Good,
Always the fear circling,
Attaching,
Hobbling.
I'm no longer young,
A girl clinging to her father's arms in the swimming pool.
I'm older now and I have been through much.
Even what I have witnessed,
Even with what I have witnessed and borne,
I still believe in the innate beauty and goodness of this life.
I close my eyes and I breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth and I sink into a meditation in which the divine will arrive and show me the way.
I seek peace,
Comfort,
And opening into a place or state in which the gratitude is so overwhelming there is no possible room for more.
Until more comes and the heart swells in further expansion and the heart is expanded again.
I close my eyes and breathe into this space and to my surprise,
Instead of this transcendent state,
My father arrives to me as a vision.
He's been departed these past 12 years but he shows up clearly to me and he has something in his hands.
It's a box of lifesavers,
The kind I used to give him every Christmas as a gift because he said he wanted them.
That's all I want from you,
He'd tell me every year.
Nothing would make me happier.
So every year from about ages five to ten,
It was the same thing.
I'd save up my money and go buy the lifesavers.
Not a single roll but the multi-pack,
The special holiday gift pack.
There were all kinds of lifesavers in the gift pack.
A roll of wintergreen,
His favorite for the way they crunched and sparkled in his mouth.
Butterscotch,
My favorite for the way they were creamy to the end.
Rainbow,
A mix of lime,
Lemon,
Pineapple,
Orange,
And cherry,
Which we'd eat when our favorite flavors were gone.
And a root beer,
Which we'd avoid eating until weeks later and finally throw in the trash.
It became our tradition after school.
I'd put down my backpack and head into his office where the lifesavers gift pack would be waiting on his desk and we'd choose our favorite flavors and eat them,
Sucking or crunching as the mood of the day dictated until they were finally gone.
Now he's holding the box out to me.
It's lifesavers,
He says to me,
And I strain toward him trying to understand what he means.
Suddenly a single wintergreen candy pops into my mind,
All fresh and green and minty and in a flash I understand what he is saying.
It's a lifesaver,
He says again more insistently,
Pushing the box toward me and I realize he is talking about my surgery.
The surgery is a lifesaver,
He says again into my mind so loudly I cannot miss it.
My fears fall away.
I'm sitting with awe pumping through my body as once again I realize the true nature of reality.
My father,
Though departed,
Has arrived to me over the years since his passing and his messages have been consistent and clear.
Everything he has told me has been accurate.
Everything he has said has come to pass.
But this message is the most clear on a day when I truly need clarity and hope most of all.
It's the symbol of his love for me,
The lifesaver gift pack we held as our Christmas tradition so many years ago.
It's also the clearest message.
The surgery is a lifesaver.
This experience will save my life,
He's telling me,
And on a new deeper level that I am just beginning to understand,
This experience will also save me from living a life spent in fear.
I am learning to shake the burr off my shoe before it attaches,
To step carefully onto the path where love and light and true reality reside.
The path is not easy to find all the time but this is my new lesson,
To live without fear,
To live in gratitude in each moment,
Not as if it were the last but as if it were the first.
Review your life today.
What burrs are on your shoe?
What fears still cling to you?
What do your dearly departed have to offer you?
Close your eyes and ask them.
Do not be surprised when they arrive easily into your vision.
The departed are always with us,
The soul connections never leave us.
Take a moment and experience yourself from the perspective of soul.
Understand with deepest gratitude that your true reality,
Your true experience,
Is as an eternal divine being.
