The first thing to know...

I’d gotten up this morning determined to stop ignoring God, and determined to learn from Her mistakes. I was walking around the living room thinking and mumbling to myself and listening.

I remembered what Anthony de Mello had said:

We don’t want to wake up. We don’t want to be happy (I wrote about that here).

“The first thing to know about anything that you think you want and don’t have is that you really don’t want it,” God said.

“You’re saying that if I want a billion dollars and don’t have it that I need to know that I don’t want a billion dollars?” I asked. Or imagined asking. It was hard to tell the difference at 6 AM. “You’re saying that reason that I’m not young is that I don’t want to be young? The reason my body hurts is that I don’t want it to stop hurting?”

“Yes,” God said. “That’s how it works. Whatever you don’t have you don’t have because you don’t want it.

“If you wanted it, all you’d have to do is ask,” God continued. “Remember this?”

“Of course I remember,” I said. “So if I asked for a billion dollars, I’d have a billion dollars?”

“Do you want a billion dollars?” God asked.

“Do you mean am I willing to work hard enough to get it?”

“No,” God said. “I’m just asking you this: if you asked and it would be given to you, would you ask?”

I thought for a moment “No. If I had a billion dollars I’d have a ton of new problems, no clue about how to deal with them, and be unhappy as a result. I don’t want the problems. So, yeah, I don’t want a billion dollars. Also, I’m afraid that if I had a billion dollars I’d be an asshole like Jeff Bezos,” I finished.

God nodded. “Bezos is a kind of an asshole. But I love him, just as I love you.”

“What about your body’s age?” God asked.

“I guess I’m OK with that.”

“Don’t guess,” God said.

“OK,” I said. I thought before I answered. “I’m OK with it. I really don’t want to be in a twenty-year-old body or even a forty. For one thing, I’d look weird next to my 79-year-old wife. People would wonder what she was doing with this young guy and what I was doing with that old lady. People would change the way they related to me. I’d get less respect. And I’d have women hitting on me, which I really don’t want right now.”

“And men,” said a reader, who might have been gay. “You had more than a couple of guys hit on you back in the day.”

“That, too,” I agreed. I turned to God. “I’m OK with my age. But my body hurts pretty much all over and I’m not OK with that.” It was true. I’d gotten out of bed with an aching back. My legs were sore. My knees hurt.

I thought for a moment. “I’m OK being old, but not OK hurting.”

“Then ‘ask and it will be given,’” God quoted.

“Really?”

God gave me a look. So I asked.

And the pain stopped.

Reader, I’m not shitting you. That happened this morning. The dialog is a poetically licensed rendition of what happened in my head, edited for clarity and attempted humor.

But I’m not shitting about the pain disappearing. It disappeared just like that.

Just. Like. That.

I’m not going to say that my body felt the way it had when I was thirty, or twenty, or eighteen. It was definitely an old body. But something had changed. It didn’t hurt the way it hurt a moment before. It still doesn’t hurt that way.

Even now, as I write this, it’s changing.

Imagine my body in layers. It’s as though something had happened to the topmost layer, the one that had felt the pain. It had disappeared. Or the pain had disappeared from the layer.

My body was not suddenly supple. It was stiff. There were deeper layers of tension, discomfort, stiffness, and maybe incipient pain beneath.

But something had changed.

“That proves nothing,” said a reader.

“It’s the placebo effect,” said another.

“Self-hypnotism,” another might have said if I’d had as many as three readers.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. I only know what I experienced. I talked to God—”

“An imaginary character,” someone said.

“Whatever,” I said. “I talked to something—”

“God,” said God.

“Whatever! I said. “And something changed. Maybe it’s true. Maybe the first thing to know about the things that I think I want is that I don’t really want them.

“Maybe there’s another way to see things.”

Maybe, God said.

Maybe the first thing to know about not subscribing is that you really don’t want to not subscribe.

Maybe you’d be making a mistake by subscribing.

Maybe you’d be making a mistake by not subscribing.

Which mistake do you want to make?