46 revolutions

I made it another 365 days in a world that has definitely intended to demonstrate to me the precariousness and value of that life and everything within it.

It has definitely not been my favorite 12 months of life and yet it is still not my worst.

What that tells me is that, no matter what is going on in our external world, the biggest grief, the lowest point, is always when we lose ourselves.

I lost myself in 2017 when my marriage fell apart. In trying to hold onto a relationship that would have organically dissolved years before were it not for my desperate efforts, I said and did things that were no longer of my heart or integrity.

The writer, David Whyte said in a workshop I attended yesterday: “Stop what you are doing right now and stop who you are becoming while you are doing it.” So often we do not stop, we do not let go and allow things to be as they are. In the process, we not only lose them more painfully, as if they are ripped from our grasp, but we suffer the same loss of ourselves, like a rug pulled out from beneath us that sends us freefalling in surprise. That was me in 2017.

In the last year, the world brought many things to my door but the difference was that, whenever I felt off-balance, I stopped and I allowed myself to forget my grand plan for a moment, to clear away what I had done before and reimagine a new path forward.

We must be continually remaking ourselves on the inside as our bodies already do naturally on the outside. Our skin growing, sloughing off, and new cells appearing. We are built this way on a biological level; we were meant to be this way.

Our struggle, as David Whyte suggests, is acknowledging our own “beautiful reluctance” to be here, in the life and circumstances in which we are planted. And it is only once we can acknowledge the true source of our reluctance, name it, move toward and through it, that we can stop letting it control us.

Not losing yourself is the greatest struggle we will ever undertake. Continually re-finding ourselves anew and yet strangely also unchanged at our core IS life.

We are not born here to become something and stay there, having reached some goal or pinnacle of self-actualization. Whenever we feel unrest, unstable, it is usually because we are holding on too long or too right to something; something is shifting beneath us and we are trying NOT to move along with it, resisting.

Time to stop doing what we’re doing and who we’re becoming while we’re doing it, forget all about us that is extraneous — choices, circumstances, stories we have told ourselves, stories others have made up about us and the world we inhabit, everything we think we “know” — and reconnect to the core of ourselves. Time to listen to what the instability is telling us and move toward it.

All negative feelings are born of this reluctance, I realize now. A reluctance to accept something about life that is usually outside of our control, a wishing that we cannot make come true.

And in order to keep remaking ourselves, we have to be willing to have our hearts broken again and again. While we resist that vulnerability, our remaking will only keep bringing us back to the same place, decorated differently.

The truly staggering part is that many of the poems, texts, religions, philosophies, songs, and cultures that have been created throughout time already seemed to know this secret or at least parts of it. There are words that resonate with these thoughts in the Bible, in Buddhist teachings, ancient philosophies, texts, and scriptures, right up to contemporary works. It’s all there, like clues to a massive secret hiding in plain sight. It is only when you hear others, your teachers, quote them that you are left wondering how you never saw it before, the interconnectedness of all things.

I think it was my friend, Jesh, that said that God is *that*, the thread that runs between all things. Spirituality then is the ability to see the thread. It’s like there are different paths of discovery down to the same core of all things, just starting from a different place. We have been taught that each different thought process or philosophy will read us to a different, more/less worthy center, when, in fact, if you strip away dogma, money, and the thirst for power, everything leads us down to the same center. And, to the extent that God exists at all as anything we could possibly grasp, that is God, there in the center of it all, in the center of ourselves, and the threads that connect us all to be another. The clues are everywhere but we are so wrapped up in our own exceptionalism or frozen by what it is that other people have told us we should know, that we miss it all.

Which is a long way of saying that life is both wildly complicated and staggeringly simple. We are never done. We are movement and growth, the rock and the water that breaks against it. We hold inside of us the key to everything as well as every closed door that stands in the way of our own discovery. We learn and build and we break apart and forget, just like the philosophers and cultures before us. The journey is inside ourselves and there are a thousand different starting points but always the same center.

Here’s to another 365 days of discovery.