Imagine this:  whatever has weighed on you suddenly no longer weighs.  It may still be there, a fact in your life, but it has no mass, no gravity.  All that has ever troubled you is now just a feature of the landscape, like a tree, a passing cloud.  Every bit of emotional and mental turmoil has ceased:  the entire burden, some form of which has been with you as long as you can remember.  A thing familiar as your closest friend -- as much a part of you as the language you speak, the color of your skin -- is utterly, inexplicably gone.

I have this impulse to climb up onto a rooftop and shout to the echoing hills, to all who will hear:  It's simple.  Just do it. You have such power, such freedom.  You little know how constantly and how deliberately you turn away from the very thing you most fundamentally want.  It is so obvious to me now, that my present experience of the world is the deeper reality that was there right along, readily available, if only I knew.  That the million ways I suffered were daily chosen by me, and that I might just as well have chosen otherwise.

The world has not changed.  It is the looker has changed.  But I keep having to hit myself upside the head to believe the world is its same self.  I cannot believe it.  It's like I want to say, What?!  It's been this way all along?  You mean, I could have lived my whole life this way, spared myself all that pointless anguish?  God, I swear, this is the best kept secret.  Everybody can do it.  I know this.  I could have done it all my life.  The ruby slippers thing:  all along it is right beside you, accessible as breath.

I did not ever have the conscious thought -- I am choosing to be terrified, and so it follows that I could choose not to be.  But the recognition had to be there, deep in, if below the level of conscious awareness.  It is a radical realization -- that we have a choice in such things.  It never had occurred to me I had a choice.  That is how it is with fear.  It seizes us.  We do not go looking for fear.  We think it fastened, inevitably, onto the thing the fear is about.  As though we cannot have one without the other.  A biopsy has a length of fear attached to it, running from the biopsy to the pathology report.  One goes with the other, like a shadow goes with its body.  I always believed I had good reason to be afraid,  actual things out in the world that justified fear --  

like a hazy cluster of calcifications on my mammogram film; damage to my good name; driving in freezing rain; the threat of my son being drafted during war time; the very real possibility that my much-older lover would die years before me, leaving me to decades of grief.  Everybody has their list.  Maybe it comes as a package:  the recognition of choice and the ability to seize it.  Maybe until we are ready to opt out of fear, we cannot bear to look in the face of the truth that we actually do have a choice.  If I don't realize this suit of skin I wear has a zipper, it won't dawn on me I have any choice but to wear the suit, every day -- even to die in it.  I have to realize I'm in prison before there's any hope of getting out. 

The magnitude of the transformation is so thorough, so all-pervasive and unhinging, so vast a reordering force in a person's condition, and it is so irrefutable that the change is permanent, that there can be no mistaking it has taken place.  The experience of the fact of transformed reality, with no possibility of return to the former life, is like this:  you are on a train, and when you look out in front of you, you can see track ahead of the train as far as the eyes can follow, disappearing over the horizon.  There are mysteries ahead, yet to be entered.  But if you go look out the back of the train, you find the track has disappeared.

So much now is so easy.  How can that be?  Where did resentment go to, and fear, and looking-forward-to, and obsessing about lost loves?

Do you mean the potential for this has been here right along?  That I've been holding it at bay, holding my shoulder to a bulging door all my life -- all my effortful, fearful life -- trying against all reason to hold away this thing that always did want to come in and overwhelm?

The poet Linda Pastan writes, "The world wounds us with its beauty."  How this idea used to run through me like a knife:  time was always running, running out.  Mortality was the dark underside of every loveliness, every pleasure.  I could not look at the beautiful world without feeling its terrible brevity.  I could not touch my tongue to life without tasting death.  Whatever made me think I needed the threat of anniliation to make me love, to wake me up?  I thought the specter of time running out would press me to live, to stop wasting time.  Now it is no longer so.  Now the lovely sky takes me into it, blue by day, black by night.  The loveliness of the sky is forever.  I am forever.  I no longer hold back from loving it: I will not lose it.  I am the sky.  Joy is unbroken, unbreakable.  There is no more poignance, no more ache.

We want to laugh.  We ache to be light.  We want to pick ourselves empty of all the rot.  The lovely world is patiently waiting to rush into all our spaces, to remind us of who we are.  It will wait as long as it takes us.