This Side and That Side by Katie Brown

1 Sept

KATIE BROWN - 1 SEP 2021

There are two sides in this life: This Side, and That Side.

I’ve spent most of my life dwelling on This Side. This Side is filled with people just like me: we look a little alike, we talk a little alike, we worry about a few extra pounds, our relationships, our children (our cats!), how to keep our frustration from exploding out of us in a ball of fiery destruction, incinerating everything within a five mile radius. And if we pause for a moment and allow all of the frenetic activity of mind and body to settle into stillness, we all experience that same bleakness of soul born of living in a world that seems to be hurtling at a catastrophic pace into self-destruction.

But, to be honest, we don’t do that too often, do we?

Then there is That Side. That Side is separated from This Side by the deepest of chasms: an impossible distance to cross. If This Side is defined by mirages and skies of interminable grey, That Side has skies of breathtaking changeability and beauty. On That Side, when it rains, the sun will elbow its way through the ominous storm clouds in due course, which turn in surprise and then in laughter to let those warming rays slip through, and then they scurry away, trailing their cloak of stormy beauty behind them and leaving a sky of freshly-washed-clean blue along with the hum of a gloriously fine day in their wake.

The funny thing is, those who dwell on That Side still show up here and there on This Side. It’s one of life’s strange occurrences. I can gaze at That Side and long with all of my might to be there, but I can’t for the life of me find my way across. But they have found the portal. They’re easy to spot, if you’re looking. They’re coloured in a little differently. With a little more… vibrancy. They can be difficult to look at - too bright, too intense - like trying to look directly at the sun. So we cloak them in our greyness to cover them up. Shush them, because we can’t bear their too-moving song. Or, more often, we just pretend they’re not there at all. We pretend until… they’re not there at all.

They know those tricks. They just smile, and nod, and wait. And in unguarded moments, when we This-Side dwellers have loosened the corsets of our held-in-check minds, they give a little smile and a wave. A shimmer of violet-coloured mist dances over us and sends a shiver up our spines, and the deepest of longings for the more-est of mores takes possession of us from the tips of our toes right through to the tops of our scalps. It’s only ever for a moment. But it’s the delicious brushing of fingertips against bare skin that’s like awakening from the deepest of sleeps to the most brilliant of days: gasping for life-giving air after being submerged in water.

They know.

After a That-Side experience like that, the longing can be unbearable. And most This-Siders prefer to pretend such experiences didn’t happen. To dismiss them as a silly imaginings. They turn back to the greyness and mundanity of their day-to-day activities, sighing a little, and they walk determinedly away from the enticing precipice dropping into that vast chasm separating Us from Them. Years pass, and each time those particular This-Siders turn away, the song of those from That Side grows more and more faint to them. Sightings of them occur less and less, as do those accompanying moments when the veil is shifted aside. And when enough time has passed, many This-Siders don’t turn towards the precipice at all: they choose to live their days with their backs turned, as far away from its disturbing edge as they can possibly get, until they believe that there is no precipice, no chasm, no That Side, at all.

As for me, I’ve walked the edge of that precipice for most of my life. I’ve always been teased by the allure of the song coming from That Side, the song that so many This-Siders plug their ears against. If I sat quietly and still enough, I could even see the outline of someone who looked just like me on the other side, smiling and laughing and beckoning me to cross. In my soul I knew that she held within her spirit the knowledge of one who had explored all, right from one end of time to the other, and could see past the exterior greyness of day and personality and plumb the depths of all around her, both on That Side and This. She knew What Could Be, because she had seen it all already. Her laughter would call out, “Come and be all that it is within you to be. You are magnificent. All is, and always will be, well.”

And you know what? Of late, for the first time, I’ve been astonished to find myself on That Side. It’s hard to say exactly how it happened. It’s as beautiful, and a thousand times more so, as I could ever have imagined it to be. And you know what else? It’s the hardest thing to inhabit your body on That Side. It’s too heavy. Too concentrated. Too substantial. Too… much. Just as those glimpses of That Siders were often unbearable on This Side, learning to live in a That-Side body is the biggest challenge one can ever face in this lifetime, and it would be so very easy to give up but for the impossible richness of the beauty surrounding me. And for the spirit-me talking to me and telling me her truths, who on That Side slips in on my breath, no longer separated by the unbridgeable chasm.

And, reader, the most peculiar thing is that now I can move between the two Sides with the greatest of ease. How about that? Sometimes it takes me awhile to find my way back from This Side to That, because the greyness of This Side can descend like a heavy, breath-stealing, mind-numbing, pea-soup fog. But I always eventually find the portal and slip through it again - and each time I find my way back, my That Side body is a little easier to inhabit.

I now find myself the recipient of those dirty This Side looks from time to time. And sometimes the greyness they try to cloak me in sends me to sleep for a spell, but I know that when the time is right, the fog will lift, and I can go back to That Side. And who knows, perhaps each time I go back I might have opened the portal for someone else, someone who was just learning to recognize their own never-seen-before colours? It’s easiest to tease those near the edge, but most rewarding to soften the granite of those who have turned away.

And thus it is so – That Side calls to This Side, and will continue to do so until time as we know it has fallen away. And how do we find our way across? It’s about closing our eyes, being still, connecting with the breath that connects us to the essence of life, and allowing what will be to be. Light, warmth, and love; pain, sorrow, and adversity: they’re the hands that lead in the daytime and the siren song in the night. Sometimes enchanting, sometimes unbearable: cloaked and mysterious, but undergirded by the all-is-well.

There are two sides in this life: This Side, and That Side.

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