It's an "Alive" Sentence

I have been an active jogger for most of my adult life, with just a few extended periods of inactivity.  A neighborhood course that only last month took me 32 minutes to finish has been taking me 33.  It's official.  I've lost a step.  It's not the first time.  It happens. You don't know when you lose it.  You just do.  It's part of the aging process.  It's a grand realization that one isn't what they used to be. 

I remember the first time I realized I had lost a step was during my graduate school years. I remember the workout.  I was running, in my mind and in my body, like I had always run before.  Working it.  Going as hard as I could.  It was on an indoor track where you were able to pass a clock on every lap, and every lap, no matter how much effort I thought and felt I was putting into it, I was coming up slower than where I thought I should be, of where I had been just a few workouts before.  It just wasn't happening.

You can overcome "losing a step" but it takes the work, and effort, and time.  Back in grad school I was determined to fight it, working out extra hard and long as much as I could.  I would race against the clock. Race against time.  Race against the inevitable.  I was in a race against life.

Eventually, one lonely Friday night, with a near empty space, about 20 minutes before the indoor gym doors closed, I got on the track and ran.  And after the first half lap I thought, what the heck, go as fast as you can and see what happens.  And that was the first and only time I broke a six minute mile, clocking in at 5:37.  Not fast, I know, for real runners, but fast for me and most people on the planet.  It was a short-lived triumph, though, as soon enough I had to accept I would never run that fast again.  It wasn't a death sentence.  It was a reminder of my mortality.

In the race against life, the unexpected autism diagnosis of your child is like losing a step - several steps, actually.  The autism diagnosis causes us to lose a step in the race in that direction which we thought we should be running, on that fast track towards...whatever.  In fact, the unexpected autism diagnosis may cause you to change tracks entirely, and maybe even run the opposite direction, or walk, or crawl, or do whatever it takes to keep moving, and move you must because in the race against life, nothing stops.

In the race against life, the unexpected autism diagnosis makes you ask:  Where were you racing anyway, that was so important to get to?  Success?  Financial independence?  Fame?  Notoriety?  Popularity?  Attention?  The life we thought we should live, were told we would live, promised ourselves we would live?   In the race against life, the unexpected autism diagnosis not only makes you lose a step but, eventually, it makes you stop running all together.  Not because you want to, but because you have to, because at some point you realize life isn't a race at all, and it never was.

It sounds like a death sentence, but it's not.  It's an "alive" sentence.  With the autism diagnosis, one eventually comes to understand that your race against life is over, and you're not dead.  In fact, you've just really started to live. You've come to realize that this race, the one you bought into, the one you believed true and real and honest, was, all along, just an illusion.  A race you had to enter because everyone else was running it, and you were in it to win it.

For me, because of the autism diagnosis, I've awakened from that dream, that illusion, that distortion of reality.  I came to realize that the race against life was actually a race towards death.  The race against life was actually a running away from the living of life, from the living of this very moment of life as I have it.  This race against life was about reaching a nonexistent finish line, one that keeps moving further away the closer you get to it, as with expectation comes more expectation, as desire begets desire.  It's a race from the fear of death through the illusion of a life where living is measured in how fast, how good and how much, and not by what mattered, but by what I was taught mattered.

Mind you, a part of me had to die in order to understand this.  Life is a series of metaphorical deaths and rebirths of our hearts, our minds, our way of being -- from the child mind to the adult mind -- from the single heart to the married heart -- from the childless way of being to the parental way of being.  We let go, and that part of us must die in order for that other part to be born and grow.  It's the myth of the Phoenix, of Persephone, of Dionysus, and the fundamental path towards enlightenment in most every major spiritual belief system on earth.  Baptism by fire is a rebirth of the soul and spirit from the ashes of your former self.

The autism diagnosis is nothing less than the opportunity to be reborn into a different way of being.  To throw out the old ideas, to redefine your role and place in the world, to stop the race against life and grandly realize that you are not the same person you used to be.  You're different.  Your race is over.  It is your time to be alive, be engaged, and to give your love, now, always now, to your child, to yourself, and to the world.

For as you love, so does the world.
As you give, so does the world.
As you are, so is the world.