The Life Force

A dandelion pushes through concrete.

A milky-eyed, three-legged cat snatches at a leaf.

A tree returns to its upright, when, finally, the storm, calms.

There’s a life-force in all that live. An imperative - to continue.

In the weeks of waiting prior to its happening, I thought a lot about the moment of returning to consciousness post-operation. Heart bypass is a big procedure. There would be a long gap between before and after. I wondered what would be the experience of realising I still existed, after a period during which I might easily have stopped existing.

The moment itself was - initially - disappointing. No great revelation. No new insight into self-hood.

For a while I slipped in and out of slight anxiety. I was inside the images of immediately ‘before’: waiting in the reception area, already slightly drugged; being wheeled fast down a white tiled corridor; a cold, machine-filled room; people to both sides of me, a woman to my right, a man to my left; things being said to and about me, that required no response from me.

Attention to the breath. In. Out. This is not the end. This cannot be the end. Can it? Is it? Is this where this wild adventure slips slowly into nothing?

Then, for half a day, I was no-self.

Then, those same impressions running through my mind.

Was I still waiting for surgery? Had it been a dream? What possible touchstone could I use to establish some kind of stable reality?

Reality began to settle. A voice asks me to squeeze a hand.

I ask if it’s all over.

‘Yes, all over’.

No. Not all over. A new phase just beginning.

Some days have passed. I’m still in hospital, still very weak.

I’m looking back on that moment of reawakening. There was a layer of what is, and then a layer of what I put on top of what is.

What is, is this: a breath. A next breath. Another. A living entity seeking to continue in its life.

Wheeling into surgery it was as if all but that layer fell away from me. Shedding skins. Agency, Response. Personality. All fell away.

Only the search for the next breath remained.

Then not even that.

When I came back I had no touchstone until I put something on top. I chose anxiety as I have so often in my life. Not a painful nor debilitating anxiety, just a scanning for threat: Has it not happened? Has something gone wrong? A level of anxiety is foundational to who I am. But it’s not ‘me’. It’a layer I place on top of who I am. On top of the life force.

The life-force is simple. It’s one moment.

A single cell of dandelion pushing through concrete.

A twitch of a cat’s tale.

The unbending of a branch.

I’ve spent so much of my life thinking about what lies beneath the layers I can see. As a painter I’m searching for the ultimate unifying force beneath the various things I make - and my choice to make my own materials while I do so.

As I start to reflect - to start the emotional reconstruction alongside the physical knitting together of what has been broken - this is a focus for reflection. Underneath all the work I’ve ever done - training presence, interpersonal/ensemble connectedness, unleashing creative freedom, improvised performance, and much else there is this: a life-force.

Underneath everything there’s a life-force though we might call it different things: the need of the dandelion to grow, the cat to play, the tree to grow tall. The need to take a next breath.

It’s a very simple realisation - but as Tessenov the architect wrote: ‘the simple answer is not always the best, but the best answer is always simple’.

Painting for me is neither an idea nor a concept.

It’s my next breath.