I woke from a dreamless sleep to find myself in a magnificent city

This sleep could be described as the sate of unknowing that represents our knowledge of our pre-birth state or our state of ignorance in relation to aspects of our personal or social being, as the state of my ignorance of deep seated domestic rifts that existed in my marriage and which insinuated themselves with explosive force into my life in my 40th year. So like Dante “mid way this way of life we are bound upon I woke to find myself in a dark wood with the right way wholly lost and gone.” (Sayers). The sense of agony at discovering that I had been betrayed, when in fact I too had engaged in a betrayals earlier of a similar psychologically incapacitating nature-a fact it took me years to acknowledge to myself, was so intense, so convoluted with doubt, accusations and counter accusations, my mind a battle field of accusations of other and examination of self, that with Dante, the wood of confusion “that dark and rough and stubborn forest” was so dense, that “the very thought of it does not “stir the old fear in the blood” as with Dante but it remained an experience that I would wish should not be suffered by anyone. Without this experience, however, how could I confront what I am compelled to acknowledge as the self and mutual deceit that has been central to the foundations of that union whose collapse now tortures me? How could I reclaim myself as I am without any apology for what constitutes the integrity of myself? So, as the Florentine came to acknowledge, such good did I gain from that wood, that I would tell of it.

I am free, in my early 40s to recreate myself. The sense of power and near boundlessness, like a horizon of opportunity receding into the distance coupled with the realisation of the wisdom gained in 40 years, a sense of freshness as if one is starting ones life afresh with the lessons learnt in an earlier incarnation intact in one’s memory. We may speak therefore, of the city of magnificent opportunity. But in the background of this groundswell of realisation and open opportunity, is the ominous note sounded by the writer of Coming out at 48: http://www.comingoutat48.blogspot.com/ that suggests that the emotional and social worlds developed through years of coming to various levels of adulthood are so fundamental to the self that reshaping them completely is virtually impossible. So the writer of the blog finds himself as the man in the image that characterizes his experience, a man falling from space. “Life stops in its tracks and then begins again. He still goes to sleep in the evening, and he still rises in the morning, but everything has changed”.