I stopped rushing into the day

The question I keep getting

How did you do all that. Why are you so happy when your hand is paralysed.

I want to answer it properly rather than kindly, because a kind answer would be useless to you.

I have bad days. It is not that I am happy all the time and I am not going to stand here and tell you that I am. There is pain, there is grief about my hand, and there are mornings when my body asks for something it should not have.

What I have is happiness inside it. Certain moments, several times a day, that remind me I am not walking through this on my own. That is a different thing from being cheerful and it is far sturdier.

“Not all of the day is happiness. But there are moments in it, and they are enough to carry the rest.”

What I actually stopped

This blog has a whole series about the things I stopped. Alcohol and cigarettes are the easy ones to name.

Here is a harder one, and it changed more than people expect.

I stopped rushing into the day.

I used to wake up and the day was already running. The phone first, because of course the phone first. Then the messages, then the news, then whatever anybody needed, then the medication, then the appointments, then the fear. By the time I had been awake twenty minutes I had already let a dozen other people decide what kind of day it was going to be.

You cannot heal in that. I do not mean it spiritually, I mean it plainly. A body that starts every morning already behind spends the whole day catching up.

What my morning actually looks like

I am going to tell you exactly, because I am tired of people describing a practice without describing what it is.

Right now, as I am dictating this, I have my EMS on. I am under my red light. My dog is lying on my feet. I have already spoken to God today. And I am drinking my coffee, which I split into two cups, because I would rather drink two small ones slowly than one big one quickly.

By this point in the morning I have already done a great many things. The difference is that I did not let the work come into my head while I did them.

I do all of it inside a little bubble that I built on purpose. I let the Holy Spirit cover me completely and I give that time to God. Sometimes it is an hour. Sometimes it is fifteen minutes. Sometimes it is the whole morning, because I like it in there.

In that place I can think. In that place I can heal. Sometimes in that place I have to cry. Sometimes I feel hopeless in there, and then I have hope again, and I could not tell you the mechanism.

That is the whole practice. There is nothing to buy and there is no app.

And if you take one thing out of this post, take this. Do not change nine things. Change the first fifteen minutes. Everything here that worked started with me being still before the day was allowed to begin, and everything that failed started with me trying to do every therapy and every change at once. Go slowly.

Three things he did that I think about every morning

The more time I spend in that bubble the more I want to be like him, and I want to tell you exactly what I mean by that, because it is not vague.

He healed a man nobody was helping. There was a man lying beside a pool who had been ill for thirty eight years. When he was asked why he was still lying there, he did not say he had no faith and he did not say he had no strength. He said he had nobody to put him into the water. Thirty eight years next to the thing that might have helped him, with no one to lift him in.

If you have been ill inside a system, you know that man. I know that man, and I was him twice.

I was that man for fourteen months, while a result about my own body sat in a computer and nobody put me in the water.

And I was that man for two years, when I let a doctor manage my health and gave him my trust. What I got back was a hand that does not work.

He touched the leper. Touching a leper was the one thing you were not allowed to do. It made you unclean. He put out his hand and touched him anyway, and the account says he was moved with compassion before he did it. He did not heal him from a safe distance with the right words. He touched the part of him that everybody else was avoiding.

And then there is his friend. Lazarus had been dead four days when he arrived. Four. The man's own sister said out loud at the tomb that by now he would smell, and I love that nobody edited that line out.

He did not care about the smell. He did not care how it looked. He was not managing anything. All he cared about was bringing him back.

I have been the person whose body was the thing in the room that nobody wanted to look at directly. I have had a tumour coming out of my neck. I know what it is to be handled carefully, from a distance, with the correct words.

So when I say I want to be more like him, I do not mean I want to be good. I mean I want to be the kind of person who does not flinch.

“He never once flinched at the state somebody was in. Not the thirty eight years, not the leprosy, not four days in a tomb. That is the part I want to be like.”

Why I am not selling you anything

This is the part I most want to say and the part that costs me money to say.

I have sixteen years of this. I have the experience of living with cancer and I now have the experience of not having to live with it in the same way any more. That is, in the language of the internet, an asset. I am told regularly what I should be doing with it.

I could sell you a guide. I could sell you supplements. I could sell you a programme and put a number on sixteen years of my life.

I am not going to.

And the reason is not business strategy. The reason is that he preached and he did not take the money, when the preachers around him did. If I say I want to be like him then that part is not optional, and it is the part everybody skips.

I am building an application and parts of it will be a subscription, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Software costs money to run and I am not a charity. But there is far more that I can give people than an application, and that part is not for sale and never will be.

And when he sent his own people out to do this work, the instruction he gave them was one sentence long.

Freely ye have received, freely give.

It is in Matthew, chapter ten, verse eight. And the same verse, a few words earlier, tells them to cleanse the lepers and raise the dead, which are two of the three stories I have just told you. He put the healing and the not charging for it in the same breath, in the same sentence, as though it had never occurred to him that they were separable.

“If this reaches one person, maybe that person has been lying beside a pool for a long time and nobody has reached out a hand. That is worth more than a paid guide, and it is why I will pull my heart out in writing for free.”

What healing actually looks like

I need to say this bluntly because the version you have been sold is a lie.

Healing is not beautiful. Healing is not fancy. Healing is not drinking a green juice for the camera and it is not showing people how many supplements you take so that they buy them through your link.

Healing is messy. Healing is sometimes heartbreaking.

Healing is being able to tell your story without breaking into pieces, because you are still feeling the pain of those days while you tell it.

Like now.

The hard part is not the telling

I am dictating this to my phone so that the words can be put in order, and I am crying, and for a moment I did not know why.

Then I did. Telling the story of my life again to strangers on the internet is not the hard part. The hard part is feeling every feeling I felt the first time. Every pain, again. Every time I was on the floor and there was nobody there to hug me. Nobody to hold me. Nobody.

It is not easy to be compassionate and it is not easy to follow him. I want to be honest about that, because the people who make it sound easy are not doing it.

What I wish I had back then is not a different diagnosis. It is the knowledge that he was there, with his hand on my shoulder, in the moments when I was certain I could not do it any more.

Because there were moments when I was certain, and then I stood up and did it anyway. There were moments when I was sure everything was about to collapse, and then the breakthrough came, and I could not have told you where it came from.

All of that has a name now, and the name is Jesus.

How Apollo came to my door

The other thing that gets me through the morning has four legs and is lying on my feet right now, and the way he arrived is the reason I believe any of what I have just written.

It was the seventh of September 2018. A Friday.

My life at that point was the opposite of everything in this post. Rushing. Working for other people. Smoking at my computer. Coffee instead of food. Never stopping.

My dog had died in 2014 and I had wanted another one for four years, because dogs are the best company there is and they bring me happiness. I had looked and looked and found nothing. And then I gave the idea up completely.

That was when the phone rang.

Downstairs, in a shopping bag

A woman was on the line, talking fast. The dog I had seen in a photograph a week earlier was downstairs. Right now. Waiting. Did I want to come and look at him, and if I liked him I could have him.

I told her I did not need to look at him. I like every dog. If he needs a home then I will take him.

It was supposed to be a rescue. It was not a rescue, they wanted money, and I will leave that there.

He was one month old and he smelled like milk, because he had been taken from his mother far too early and somebody had been feeding him treats. His belly was so swollen it had gone almost blue. And he was frightened to come with me, because even though nobody had treated him well, people were the only thing he knew.

I had been on my way out to buy something for dinner. I had a shopping bag in my hand.

I went out for chicken and I came home with a dog.

So I ran home, shut him in the bathroom where he would be safe, and then I ran. I do not think I have ever run so fast in my life. It was a Friday evening and everything was about to close, and I went to buy the only thing I knew you could give a puppy, which was chicken and rice.

Two hours later he was asleep on my bed, snoring, with the air of somebody who had owned the place for years.

That had not been the plan. The plan was to nurse him back to health for a few days and then find him a home. I looked at him sleeping like that and I knew he was never leaving.

“I tried to smuggle him into the supermarket inside the shopping bag, because I thought a puppy would not be a problem. They threw me out.”

Two days on the floor

I had not even named him yet when I took him to the vet, and the vet told me that the kindest thing to do was to put him to sleep.

He was full of parasites. There was plastic in his stomach. He was blocked.

I asked what else there was. The vet said there was an injection that would make him vomit, and it might empty his stomach, and it would be very hard on him, and he might die in the middle of it.

I did not care about the odds. I knew he was a fighter. So I asked the vet what I should do once the injection was in, and he told me to buy a great many paper towels and be ready to clean.

I spent two days lying on the floor, in the one part of my apartment I could cover with paper, watching a one month old dog vomit without stopping.

It was heartbreaking. Every time he was sick I cleaned it. Every time I cleaned it I gave him water. I did that until I passed out from exhaustion where I lay, and then he woke me up by wagging his tail and licking my face.

I was lying on the floor in the middle of all of it and the only thing in my head was that he was still alive.

The name

I rang my son and told him I had a dog, and he started laughing at me. He said, right, so now you are going to call him Apollo, because he knows exactly who his mother is.

And I said yes. Why not. His name is Apollo.

Stay with that for a moment, because it took me eight years to look at it properly.

Apollo is the Greek god of healing and medicine. He is also the god of the sun.

I named a dying one month old dog after healing and after the sun, as a joke, on the telephone, in 2018. Four years before the Tuesday when a doctor looked at my neck and told me I was full of cancer. I was not being clever. I was laughing with my son on a Friday night with a bathroom full of paper towels.

Then I took everything that was in my bank account and I bought the entire dog shop. A harness. Treats. Milk. A bottle, and I fed him from the bottle.

“I did not know, lying on that floor at three in the morning with the paper towels, that I was nursing back to health the one who was going to carry me through everything that came next.”

Eight years later

He is not easy. He makes me crazy. He is a very strong dog and he has dysplasia, so we have been fighting something together, which is its own kind of company.

I cannot find a version of myself where he is not in my life.

Because of him I took my driving test. I had been without a car for ten years and I bought one, because I want to take him to the forest, and then to the sea to watch the sun go down. That was the order of it. Licence, car, forest, sea. He loves the sun.

And I will not find a love more unconditional than his anywhere in this world. He does not care what my hand does. He does not care what the scan said. He has no opinion at all about my prognosis.

Now look at the order of those events.

I gave up looking. He arrived at my door the same week. He was nearly dead and I kept him alive on a bathroom floor with chicken and rice and paper towels. I gave him the name of healing and of the sun without thinking about it for one second. And four years later, when I was the one on the floor, he was the one who stayed. Now I am driving him towards the sun, which is the only thing in this whole story that was my own idea, and I am not even sure about that one.

Looking backwards, I can see the plan. I could not see it at the time. Nobody can, that is the entire nature of it. But from here the order is so obvious that it is almost funny, and it was obvious to somebody long before it was obvious to me.

And none of this seeing, none of this putting the pieces together, would have been possible without the illness and without that space in the morning where I am allowed to be alone with myself. That is what was given to me. That is what the bubble is for.

This is how healing starts

Here is the thing nobody says about being ill. It gives you time. Terrible time, expensive time, time you did not ask for and would not have chosen, but time.

And it turns out that the number of things you can work out about your own life, once you have the time and you stop running through it, is enormous. The order of events. Who was helping and who was not. Which doctor you should have left. Why a dog arrived at your door the week you stopped looking for one.

None of that is visible at speed. I lived forty years at speed and I saw none of it.

I stopped rushing. That opened the door to everything. This is how healing starts.

Not with a supplement and not with a protocol. With fifteen minutes in which nobody else is allowed in, where you are alone with yourself and with God, and where you are finally slow enough to see the shape of your own life.

And I know what my purpose is not. It is not to be the perfect successful person on Instagram. I am a person who wants to bring out what it really means to heal, and I do not want anybody following me because of me. I want to tell you everything I know, all of it, so that you do not have to find it out the way I found it out.