Revelation

 

I arrived in London much as I did the last time – little money, exhausted, and still toting in one hand the outsized Where’s Wally posters for my daughter that had now been halfway around the world twice. I went to the same hotel I had stayed at to recover from my sliced tongue more than two months earlier – the County Hotel which has a shared bathroom and charges 43 pounds a night for a room that can’t fit much more than a bed and my suitcase.

Jet-lagged, I went to sleep at 3 in the afternoon London time, which was bed-time under my Canadian schedule. I woke up at 1 a.m.

And something had suddenly changed.

What happened next changed my life.

More than a day later, I wrote this e-mail to my close friend Colin in Singapore:

 “Man, these last 30 hours or so have been some of the most incredible in my life. I woke up at 1 a.m. Wednesday, London time. I was still a bit jetlagged and feeling like I just had a decent nap. I was staying in this cheap hotel near King’s Cross that was not much more than just a bed. My suitcases took up all the floor space and it had no bathroom. The previous tenant’s dried snot still clung to the wall above my bed, cobwebs hung from the corners and I put a towel down before daring to even sit on the lone textile-covered chair in the room. Ambulances, garbage trucks and the like rattled the window throughout the night as my ill-sealing window looked down on a busy street.

I had been vagabonding for three months, unable to see my daughter, very quickly running out of money and I knew that I had another three months or more of the same, possibly living out of the cheapest hotel I could find in a small Bulgarian industrial town on the Romanian border so that I could be close to Amy.

An attempt to cross the Romanian border might work, with a lot of luck, or it might get me banned for even longer. Or I could wait for three months and go back naturally.

But for some reason I woke up feeling a deep contentment, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe a dream that I can’t remember. But I could feel myself smiling. I just sat there in involuntary meditation for hours. It was kinda like a buzz and very pleasant lightheadedness at the same time. And a tremendous clarity of thought. At the risk of cheapening the feeling, it felt a bit like the few seconds after you take your first two or three sips of coffee on a relaxed Sunday morning. But it lasted for hours and I was flooded with revelations.

I watched out my window as a drugged up American tried to hijack a milk truck (!) across the street. The driver ran with his keys into an apartment building and, with the help of the security guard there, locked the glass doors. The American kicked through the glass door, demanding the keys, and started fighting with the two until the police came.

I was detached all the way through, no adrenalin – even smiling. Throughout these past three months, I’ve had so many incredible moments that kinda passed me by. The travel, reconnection with the family, writing while a deer and her babies grazed in my mom’s backyard, the brief period of sunshine in Milan, my party where I sang with my long-lost brother at the top of my lungs to both my first girlfriend (Karna the redhead) and my last girlfriend (Roxana the blonde), watching Roxana stroll barefoot through my mom’s neighborhood and charming all the neighbors on their porches.

I never enjoyed these moments as I should have. Or maybe I did enjoy some of them, but they just punctuated what was otherwise a high-stress period of constant nagging worry.

But somehow, in the middle of the noisy London night, I recaptured those whole three months and made it right. A striking realization had come to me – this was all meant to be. I was supposed to take a lesson from all of this. I’m not at all one for believing in fate – or I wasn’t anyway – but the conviction was so strong. It just hit me in the head. I always knew I had to take a lesson from all of this. But this came unexpectedly, even though I had been preparing for the unexpected. Rather than thinking logically about what I can learn from this, I just absorbed the lesson. It’s hard to describe but it was a sea change for me.

The lesson was this – no more “gotta get goin’.” By the time I realized what my lesson was meant to be, I had already learned it. I had learned, through a lightning-bolt epiphany, to enjoy the small moments, the subtleties. They are the smallest details in life but they are also the most important. It almost felt like a key to happiness. No. It was a key to happiness.

And I don’t need to struggle to implement that lesson anymore – it just feels natural now. I’m not saying that this is a lesson I have to remember – I don’t. It was a sudden change that you will see.

It also settled my mind about some bad news about my 2.5-year-old nephew Callum. As I was leaving Vancouver, he and his mom were at the Children’s Hospital and came to visit me at departures immediately after a specialist appointment near the airport. I fell in love with my nephew, Callum, while staying in Nanaimo. He was the happiest child I had ever met – no shit at all! I can see why he’s the poster child for his type of cancer and why the RCMP and others are doing charity drives for him and reporters cover his plight. Everybody falls in love with him – the way he’s learned to wink at the nurses, engage with strangers.

His mom, Tammy, had come straight from the specialist appointment, crying in the airport, and I was the first to hear – his cancer had come back, bad. Callum was feeding his rice cakes with ketchup to the birds, laughing, and constantly telling “Unka Agam” to watch and play while his mom was telling me that his outlook is dire.

So, at about 6 a.m. in my hotel, hours after I awoke, I started to write down the experience of those hours of sudden meditation, or whatever it can be called.

I wrote that, even though I still face much more of this chaos, the period of trials and tribulations has definitively ended. I knew that I would enjoy those three months without trying. As a matter of fact, I could ONLY enjoy the coming chaos by NOT trying to enjoy them. I knew that deeply.

I wrote for almost two hours and those scribblings are now the most important writings to me that I have ever done.

At the end, I decided to just pack and go to Heathrow airport. I had no flight and I had no clue where I would go. I would just sit in Heathrow for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, a week, whatever, with no destination in mind. The length of my stay there didn’t matter. Maybe I would eventually go to Singapore and visit you, or back to Nanaimo, or maybe to that Bulgarian border town.

I knew Heathrow may not be the place to leave from too but I felt compelled to go there, with no ticket. Most of my travel to and from London recently has been through Luton or Gatwick airports.

I always hated airports but I knew that now, with this revelation, I would actually effortlessly enjoy just sitting there for days. I had fully and completely absorbed the lesson and knew with certainty that this whole period had been about reaching that moment for me – that realization that I will enjoy moments from now on and not be always looking for the next thing.

So, I shaved, showered in the hotel’s common bathroom, and packed for a very extended stay on an airport chair.

I was walking out of my hotel room at 8 a.m. when my cell phone rang.

It was Roxana.

She was shouting, breathless and excited.

“Adam! I have some news! You have to go to Heathrow. Now! You are coming home – tonight!”

“I know,” I said. “I’m already on my way there.”

For some reason, I wasn’t surprised by the call in the least. If my voice registered any surprise, it was only because I wanted her to enjoy the moment.

Out of the blue, while I had been writing my thoughts to cement the lesson, Roxana had gotten a call from a friend of a friend of a friend. And that call, by a series of coincidences, meant I could get through the airport.

So, I’m now sitting Thursday morning in the office I had set up at Roxana’s place just before getting kicked out of the country on May 21.

I’m back in Romania.

It really seems that, as soon as I absorbed the lesson I needed to learn from this chaotic period, something opened up for me.

I had my suitcase in hand, hotel door open, when Roxana called. Of course, I set up my computer again to book the ticket. But then I was off. To emphasize, it’s not the coincidence of Roxana’s phone call that amazes me. Not in the least. I was not surprised by it. All the writing I did about the revelation that night and morning was before Roxana called. And that writing – typos and run-on sentences and all – was crystal clear. I had learned a fantastic lesson. What a ride! No shit. Adam.”

So, I am back. I am here and now. In a few days, I start updating this blog with the topic that is now, happily, ruling my life.

I am talking about enjoying all five senses, taking time to smell the flowers – and the public restrooms and the perfumes and the taxi seats and the incense. See the flashing light of a television through an apartment window, the fading shades of red at sunset, the mirages, the fluorescent lights first thing in a groggy morning. Feel the flutter of your heart, the blood rushing through your veins, the click of fingertips on a keyboard, your bare feet on cool summer tiles, the doctor’s needle. Hear the varying tones of the jackhammer as it digs deeper, the foundation of the charm in your favorite songs, the anguish of a car’s horn and the silence of a Sunday morning and the chirp of morning birds. Taste the rainbow of oil that once shimmered on your coffee beans, the hint of vinegar in your peach, the salt of a sweaty summer’s afternoon.

(This is Part 6 of a Six-Part Series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)