Beyond Vision by Allan Jones

Author:Allan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

4 A BURST OF OPENNESS

I head down my usual route on a hot steamy day in August, trying to release some of the pent-up strain by going for a very long walk. I am weighed down by a sense of leaden oppression and feel so tired I can no longer think; I just walk and walk. My vision sees the sky as darkly overcast despite the heat. It seems as I pace along that the dim light through which I move is indistinguishable from my own inner murk. Although I am usually very attentive to the sounds around me, and had formed the habit of processing them into my forward movement as a matter of course, my footfalls and cane-taps are as distant and muffled as the noise of traffic several blocks away. I am quite turned within, and everything in there is silent and static. The sense of self is buried somewhere within the inner awareness that attends to white cane walking, but even this seems clouded and dull.

After perhaps half an hour of this numb plodding, it just happens. Out of the blue I find myself confronted with a very simple but momentous thought: Just say yes. And I do so, instantly, not pausing to consider the vast implications. It is at that moment that I finally and fully acknowledge my gayness. I accept it not resignedly and grudgingly as an unavoidable fate but positively and unconditionally, as something to be totally affirmed. I just open right up, from the inside out.

That single moment changes everything. The long-accustomed and burdensome feeling of heaviness is gone from my shoulders, upper back, and the back of my neck. My body is buoyant and tingling, borne along by a joyous inner airiness that is wide open and receptive to every­thing. The audible world flows in. The sounds of birds and kids and dogs must have been there all along, but now they are unimpeded and ringing clear. They sound marvellous and new, as though I had never heard such things before. “I am gay” has given way to an affirmation of being so simple and unqualified that it could be expressed only as “I Am.” It seems strange that I should be walking exactly as before, the legs and cane having worked automatically during the inner transition.

Over the following days and weeks the most dramatic external manifestation of this inner breakthrough was a conspicuous lowering in the level of my chronic physical tension. I started to loosen up all over, and felt as though I had been detoxified. The easing of muscle tension was so marked that my excellent massage therapist, Arlene Cybulskie, finally asked me what big thing had changed in my life. So I told her. She responded with personal congratulations and a kind of professional satisfaction. “The way you were always bunged up here, here, and here,” she said as she kneaded my back with her clever hands, “finally makes sense. You were carrying around all that stress.”

Now,

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