James Loney, Toronto

  As a former hostage, I have discovered people have a natural curiosity about experiences of captivity. When I’ve met people who have, like me, survived a kidnapping, I found myself wanting to ask the very same questions that are often asked of me.
   How long did it last? How did they treat you? Where were you held? Were you handcuffed, chained, blindfolded, gagged? Did you have a plan to escape?  What were you given to eat? How did you go to the bathroom? What kept you going? How has the experience affected you?
   The reason for this curiosity, I think, is because extraordinary time has a great deal to teach us about ordinary time.

  As a former hostage, I have discovered people have a natural curiosity about experiences of captivity. When I’ve met people who have, like me, survived a kidnapping, I found myself wanting to ask the very same questions that are often asked of me.
   How long did it last? How did they treat you? Where were you held? Were you handcuffed, chained, blindfolded, gagged? Did you have a plan to escape?  What were you given to eat? How did you go to the bathroom? What kept you going? How has the experience affected you?
   The reason for this curiosity, I think, is because extraordinary time has a great deal to teach us about ordinary time.
   Catholics will immediately recognize the phrase ordinary time. It is the terrain where most of us live most of our lives. Often mundane, occasionally joyful, almost always taken for granted, it is the workaday round of everyday life. Getting up in the morning, rushing to work, cooking dinner and washing dishes, paying our bills – all the unexceptional things we have to do to tend the garden of our lives – seed and weed and harvest – day in and day out, year upon year.
   Ordinary time is our natural habitat. It is the homeostasis our organism needs to grow and thrive. It is as basic to us as soil, water and air. But it can also be a difficult place to live in well. We can lose our way in it, forget who we are, become a little complacent and dull, even numb, find ourselves pierced by lonely wonderings: is this all there is? There has to be something more!
   There is, of course. There always is. But sometimes we just can’t see it. In ordinary time, banality and routine descend and fall around us, like a fog, like a curtain.
   Extraordinary time couldn’t be more different. It is when everything breaks open and everything matters. It is a cusp, a verge, a brink where we tight wire between being and not-being. Or, what is imaginably worse, continuing to be but so changed that we are no longer recognizable – to ourselves or anyone else.
   On the mountain they’re called conditions. Lightning and storm, breath-stopping wind, sheer everywhere ice, fresh-snow avalanche. Exposure. Crisis. Peril. When, as U2 sings, “You’re stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it.”
   Extraordinary time can be place of shivering terror or full-throttle vitality. Regardless, it is a place of azure clarity where we know exactly who we are and what we want. There is only the now, the next step, the next breath. Every sight and sound is like the first because we know it could be our last. We hold the measure and weight of our lives – survival itself – in our hands.  
   This, I think, is why we are attracted to extraordinary time. It reveals to us what we often cannot see or feel in the forests of ordinary time – the luminous charge of just-being-alive.
   We approach it carefully, dip our toe in it. White-water rafting. Parachute jumping. Hollywood action thriller. Reader’s Digest true life adventure. A different fix for every person according to temperament and appetite. Even the most daring, however, wear a helmet and put on a harness. We always want to come home to solid ground, to land safely back in ordinary time.
   On November 26 it will be seven years since our captivity began. Hard to believe. Time does fly when you’re having fun. Or you’re at least home-free.
   Horrible as they were, I think of those four months of fear and deprival as a kind of school. In that extraordinary time and place, I got to see and experience things I would never otherwise on the plains of ordinary time. How everything is connected and everything we do matters. How anger is sacred survival energy. How powerful the will to live is and how much it is possible to endure. How every act of violence has a pointing finger behind it. What it’s like to feel that God has died. How glorious it is to open a door, step outside, walk wherever you want as long as you want – the incredible amazing wonders of ordinary time – reading a newspaper, making yourself a cup of tea, riding a bicycle.
   I must confess, I am firmly back in the land of ordinary time. Which is to say, I have lost sight of its infinite wonders. Except, when I remember to look up at the sky, it will come back to me in a rush, that first-time joy of seeing blue after 118 days in captivity, what you can reach for and never touch, blue the colour of freedom.
   And this I think is its greatest wonder, and perhaps its only danger, that we take ordinary time for granted. Perhaps that is why we seek these intimations of extraordinary time. They help us to remember to look up and see, the ocean of blue above us, a world without a ceiling, possibility and wonder in everything.