the day you are born and the day you find out why.
—Mark Twain
I’ve begun to take the first tentative steps to putting my marriage and family back together.
I’ve met with a Psychologist who specializes in past lives therapy and hypnotic regression but curiously, he’s not pushing that kind of intervention with me—he actually convinced me to sign up to receive instalments of his correspondence course.
I know it sounds lame and I’m not even sure why I made the commitment, but just working on getting together the materials to prepare me for the first lesson has resulted in a kind of epiphany and frankly, has left me a bit shaken.
It was simply intended to be a preliminary first step—to download a calendar from the year prior to when I met my wife Clare.
It was a benign exercise really, just an organizational tool to jog my memory about what was happening in my life at the time and the types of things influencing my thoughts and attitudes back then.
But the mere act of Googling that time period and downloading a calendar for that year caused me to experience a vivid flashback of the events surrounding the extra-marital affair that ended my marriage.
It’s a curious thing about people—they say they want change but as T.S. Eliot once remarked, human beings cannot bear very much reality.
I can’t. The vivid flashback I experienced was upsetting enough in itself, but it also forced me to face things I tried to bury.
I experienced a brutal but revealing insight into my mindset at that time and it was like reliving the event all over again.
The experience was too much like what I envision hell to be—an eternity of reliving past misdeeds with no hope of ever changing anything, and it left me totally despondent.
And I hadn’t begun the first lesson.
I hadn’t realized how much I buried the painful events of my breakup with Clare. I thought I had simply forgotten a lot of the details—that they were hazy because of the passage of time.
But now, I realized I had deliberately pushed down a lot of the painful images that arose in my consciousness and these same images would return in bits and pieces to haunt my dreams.
The past two years had been particularly oppressive with me trying to drown my sorrows in alcohol as if I were trying desperately to swallow a bitter pill.
Who would have thought that just taking the time to examine my life could be so upsetting?
I spent the rest of the night musing about why so much of my life was tinged with denial—pushing away hurtful thoughts and memories and sometimes even people so I wouldn’t have to face painful truths.
By midnight, I was thoroughly dispirited and exhausted from chasing the tail of my mind and that’s when I finally surrendered and messaged Ken, my Psych guru and asked if I could drive out into the country again on the upcoming Saturday to discuss certain matters with him.
A few minutes later as I was turning off the lights to go to bed, my phone binged with a notification. It was Ken saying Saturday morning was available and his wife would be at a country market with friends, so we’d have the house to ourselves.
A wave of relief swept over me along with a pang of nostalgia. I realized I was hoping Ken’s wife would again leave freshly baked muffins for us—and somehow that summed up how deprived and needy I really felt.
On Saturday I drove out to the counrty to talk to Ken and ask him why just following his correspondence course was causing such a seismic shift in my thoughts.
“It’s pretty simple, Lucas,” he smiled, “we tend to avoid painful things and push them away—not on purpose, but it happens. But in a guided program such as you’re following you have to confront the facts.”
“But even if I face the facts how will this help Clare? How will it change her mind and soften her attitude toward me?”
“You just have to stay the course and work through the program,” he said calmly. “In time things will change—not overnight, but gradually.”
Srangely enough, I believed him. And went away encouraged although still not comppletely convinced.
Over the next few weeks I began to see the truth in what Ken was telling me.
Clare and I had been both frozen in time. But as I worked through the process of systematically revisiting my past, I gained insight and it changed me.
It seemed unbelievable but it was real.
Lately, I’ve been having episodes where I relive moments from the past involving her and she's been having very realistic dreams that involve the same thing with me.
Where this is going neither of us is sure but now one thing is clear—this isn't just some paranormal experience confined to me because we're both soemhow experiencing this process together.
And that fact alone consoles me.
I thought I was in this alone, seeing Ken Blogett, my Psych guru and believing I was on my own trying to change my life. But, as it turns out, Clare and I are enmeshed, almost to the point where we're feeling each others' feelings and unable to draw boundaries between us.
I should be upset about the loss of individuality, but I'm actually comforted. I've come to realize that the problems between Clare and I revolved around my being too focussed on myself and meeting my own needs.
We were't a team and consequently, we drifted apart to the point where I became infatuated with Marnie Ferguson at work and ended up having an affair.
It took losing Clare to teach me how selfish and insensitive I had become.
It's weird. I thought Clare and I were the playthings of the gods but now I'm beginning to see a deeper principle at work in our relationship.
They say that things that belong together don't need to be tied. But Clare and I seem to have an even deeper bond than that. We seem to exhibit a natural bond reminiscent of entangled particles in quantum physics.
Apparently it doesn't matter how much we're separated spatially, we still end up mirroring each other—Clare in dreams and I in day to day reality.
"I seems the cosmos wants us together," I tell her, and who are we to deny the universe?”
She laughs and shakes her head in wonder. "Truth is, I've been totally miserable without you. Oh sure, I went through the bitterness and anger of feeling betrayed by you, but all the time I didn't want to punish you so much as to make you see what your selfishness had caused.”
I nod solemnly. "I'd say that message has been received, loud and clear.”
"I hope so, Lucas, because I don't ever want to feel that abandonment again”
I hang my head in shame trying hard to suppress the tears burning my eyes.
"I really need a hug," she whispers.
I enfold her in my arms.
I don't know who was happier, Ken or me when I phoned him and told him the news.
"I'm so glad you and Clare have reconciled. If you're ever out for a drive in the country drop by for coffee and muffins. My wife, Amy, would love to meet both of you.”
"I just may take you up on your offer, Pal. I've been telling Clare all about our sessions and she's eager to meet you too.”
There's a pause on the line and then Ken adds, "No one has a perfect life, Lucas. We all make mistakes, but I'm a great believer in second chances. It's like renovating a fixer-upper. Sometimes the redo is better than the original.”
Ken's words struck a note that vibrated in sympathy inside me. I wondered if entanglement applied to friendships as well and if Amy and Ken weren't the perfect complement to Clare and me.
Perhaps we'll have to take that drive in the country to see.