Life
Transitions
“What
do you do the day after you change your life?”
Barbara
Brown Taylor (Leaving Church)
Yesterday,
I wrote about abrupt and unexpected changes in life's direction, and
how dizzying they can be. We experience something akin to vertigo
when we resign, retire, or are laid off from a job, a marriage ends,
our last child, or only child, leaves home, or we receive a life
changing diagnosis. We get up the next morning with no blueprint for
our day, no familiar structure, however binding it may have been, to
support us. Everything familiar now seems oddly foreign. We may have
plenty to do, but somehow we don't know where to begin.
Most
of us go through life with a distant fantasy about what we will do
when we have time and space to do what we want. But when that time
comes, we stutter and side-step. What happens, nine times out of ten,
is that we produce more “have to do's” in order to reduce the
level of anxiety we feel when presented with free time and empty
space. “I'll get to it as soon as I clean out the closets that are
stacked to the rafters.” or, “As soon as I clear out the
basement/attic and carry all those boxes of junk to the thrift store,
I'll do something creative.” Or, we throw ourselves into
church work, or volunteer work, or anything that will sop-up some of
that terrifying empty space.
We
want to find our way, but we don't know how. It is the very nature of
human beings to move faster in such situations—adding more and more
busy work and outside responsibilities. What we really need to do is
sit down and wait. We need to take some time to rest, and pray, and
meditate. We need to be with the discomfort long enough to write
about it, or in some other way to acknowledge just how unsettling and
uncomfortable it is to be in a major life transition.
If
you are in such a place of transition, clear the space for
contemplation. Allow Spirit to call you into the wilderness for a
spell. If you give yourself time to see what comes naturally, of its
own volition, to fill your hours and days, you may find that what
comes will be better than anything you could have imagined or
manufactured for yourself. When the cloud of confusion clears, you
will know which path belongs to you.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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