Two Visions

Recently I decided I wanted to live. It wasn't that I exactly wanted to die, before. I certainly wasn't suicidal. I just wanted to escape.

Finally I realized that, in Real Life, or as it's usually referred to in my Faith, looking at things from a spiritual point of view, death isn't what we think it is, anyway. Check the New Testament where Christ says, "let the dead bury the dead." This makes it plain to me that we are not just people having [or not having] a spiritual experience, we are by nature spiritual beings having a physical experience in the physical world, until it's time to move on to the next world, which is only spiritual. And none too soon, I was beginning to think, as I reflected on my multiple tests and challenges. I feel as if I were drowning.

However, if physical death is just moving on, than real "death" is spiritual death; being out of touch with spiritual life. I decided I don't want to be spiritually dead. I want to live.

That was one duality I've been dealing with.

The other duality is my ambivalence about returning to nursing work. The more time I spend in hospitals with nurses who are really on top of their "game"; the more I read job announcements and job descriptions; the more I reflect on how I feel about continuing in the role of a nurse, the more I realize I'm just not that sharp. My heart isn't in it anymore. I want to find something else, but I haven't found the "something else" yet, and it's terrifying to wonder how the future looks. It's like having one foot in a boat and the other on the dock, and the boat is starting to move . . .

Now this duality and all my fears about how to manage a transition from one outlook to another, one occupation to something unknown, with no map or directions, seems to have found a physical manifestation in the sudden onset of my double vision.

My optometrist believes that this is just one more symptom of my optic neuritis flaring up, and that I need to return to the neuro-ophthamalogist to find out what to do. My hunch is that he will do very little. I spent money, that should be going towards rent and bills, on glasses with a new prescription to improve acuity on the left [affected] side. It won't change the double vision, which comes and goes. I didn't buy the medical COBRA from my job, as they wanted something like $800/month. [And, of course, I had dropped my $300/month Regence policy as soon as the work health care kicked in.] Now I'm given the option of spending more money, which I don't have, to solve this problem.

Anyway, through prayer and meditation, I found a place where I have a lot more trust, and feel a lot more alive. Almost joyful. In spite of the difficulties I am in.

O Man of Two Visions! Close one eye and open the other. Close one eye to the world and all that is therein, and open the other to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved.

~Baha'u'llah