There are times, it seems to me, in each one of our lives, when our reality does a full turnaround. At least that’s what happened to me; and from what I’ve seen, there are other stories and experiences out there where people have experienced–or are experiencing, pretty much the same thing.
Life can turn on a dime and leave you shocked. It can leave you confused and bewildered at first. You find yourself standing on new ground, feeling into a brand new normal. (What’s happening? What can it mean?) There’s an ache, perhaps, or a call that refuses to be ignored, or some unexpected event. Maybe you meet someone…and suddenly everything changes.
So, what I once thought was my life, all neatly arranged and set out for me, all of a sudden was turning out not to be my life after all. I had a job where I had been for almost twelve years. My husband and I had just recently bought a house. I had been quite prepared to coast. I was complacent and fairly content.
Yet inwardly, I was begging for something else. I was begging for something to jar me, jolt me, give me the sense of confidence I seemed to lack.
I wanted something to make me brave. And I was begging for something to lift me out of the interminable rut of circular thoughts and too similar days and weeks and months. The thing is: I don’t think I actually believed the answer to this sort of vague, amorphous, almost secret prayer was on the way…and then it showed up.
(I discovered that’s how it works. That’s how thought works. That’s how prayer works. It’s creative.)
Getting catapulted out of your comfort zone can be dizzying. Receiving what you wish for is not always comfortable. This wasn’t even close to comfortable. In the midst of the confusion I wanted to blame. I wanted to attack. I wanted to scream and to cry and to vent my anger.
I did those things. I did all those things a lot.
What feels like your heart breaking can actually be your heart cracking open. What may feel like abandonment is a call to come back to yourself.
My husband was doing things like packing up and moving into a hotel room, leaving me in the house we’d just bought. Later he was taking off on a road trip without knowing when (or even if) he would be returning.
He had met people. He had gone away to a retreat. Of course I was aware of this…no big surprise there. What I hadn’t expected was for him to return so changed…so ready to launch into something that felt so radical to me. (How often does a “retreat” actually shift one’s life?) The first thing he did was to ask me to call him by a different name. He wanted to mark the change. “Please call me Jake instead of Jacob.”
At various points I heard him saying things like: “We’re not married,” and “Goodbye forever.” He was also saying things like he was always right there with me…that we were One.
And all along he said this could be the best thing that ever happened to me. He asked me to sit with that idea for just a second a day, to begin with.
Not once did he say he didn’t love me. Although there were times when he mentioned not being so sure what love is.
He wanted to be free. He was in some sort of existential pain that wasn’t quite making sense to me. Understanding it seemed to be just out of my reach.
One day, in a tough conversation with my boss at work (my performance was slipping), she put it beautifully…he was climbing his metaphorical Mt. Everest. I breathed a sigh of relief at being heard. But still, what on earth was the meaning of all this?
He spent the holidays with me in 2016, with all the ensuing tumult and confusion and sweet moments of connection; and on New Year’s Day of 2017 he was off on his journey. He was on his road trip. I was left sitting in the house we’d moved into in October, trying really hard to remember that “this could be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
What I didn’t know was that I was about to go on a journey of my own…one that had nothing to do with him.
I found myself in my own existential pain. It all seemed so surreal. I couldn’t quite explain it to anyone because I couldn’t really explain it to myself. And in February of 2017, I wanted my own retreat. I wanted to see, for myself, what this thing he had experienced might be. After all, it seemed like this was some powerful stuff! What might happen?
Well, let me tell you what showed up…
One thing that showed up was that the two of us ended up moving in and out of each other’s orbit…not quite “together”, and not really “apart” either. Sometimes he was calling or texting me. Sometimes he he wasn’t. Sometimes we found ourselves on the road, right there in the same car. We flew off to Paris, as it turns out, together–in the summer of 2017. That September we went to Burning Man and stayed in separate tents…and the tents were next to each other.
I was doing an awkward dance around the idea of independence. At Burning Man they’d called it Radical Self Reliance. I wanted it desperately. I also didn’t want it. The truth is, I used to call myself the most dependent person I knew. I was hiding from what I wanted; and yet little by little I started noticing places where I was coming out of hiding and getting just a little bit stronger.
In April of 2017 I quit my job. Somehow I knew it was the right thing to do, and yet I was scared to death.
In March of 2018 the house was sold. Jake wrote a heartfelt love letter about the house. I believe that letter ended up helping us sell it as we handed it out to prospective buyers.
A buyer was found and the house cleaned out of the furniture and most of the “stuff”. (What a strange and unusual way for my wish to simplify to show up!) There was no “outward” home anymore. Everything was moving me to find the inward one.
Through it all, what I had to finally realize what that I was the one who had knocked my own world off its axis. Everything that appears in front of me is a direct message to me. Something had wanted change so deeply that it created that change. My desires, my attitude, my fears…all of that is creative energy. And it was actually all right. One day I noticed that I was all right. Yes, I was on completely unfamiliar ground…and yes, sometimes that was absolutely terrifying. But it was also exhilarating.
I am still in the center, in the eye, of that process.
For my sixtieth birthday, I had set my sites on a trip to Ireland, and guess what: in the summer of 2018 I found myself there…on my own…for two months. That’s when I started this blog.
Dreams and schemes are still showing up. Possibilities are always showing up.
I don’t have it all planned out, and I’m still not exactly sure where my life may be headed. What’s amazing though, is that I’m finding I believe in wishes. I’m learning how to play this song by ear.
What I know is, there is only forward. There is no way back to an old life. I am also learning that we are present in this life to feel and I’m learning not to be afraid of that.