I’m reaching out to you at an unusual point in the month because we moved locally. Despite me promising my family during three years of househunting that moving would not be a big deal it HAS BEEN A BIG DEAL. I am reminded of my favorite Dolly movie, Steel Magnolias.
To refresh you, in Steel Magnolias, our main girl Shelby has been advised that it would be extremely risky to her health to carry a pregnancy. Shelby decides to have a baby anyway. As she breaks the news of her pregnancy to her mother M’Lynn, Shelby assures her, “I am going to be very, very careful, nobody is going to be hurt or disappointed or even inconvenienced.” Shelby and I are control freak liars (or at least wishful-thinkers). Some things are just a big deal and pregnancy and moving are two of them.
Throughout the moving process, I had a few people ask me why I would leave something so good for something unknown. The truth is that I felt secure enough to be bold. My husband’s endless raft of love makes me feel this way – so well loved that I can afford to get really big. A good house will offer a measure of this, too – a home base from which we can spring. In the end, all good parenting is also this (structure and warmth).
Now here we are on the other side, and box by box things were getting better but then one of my kids got hurt. She’s ok but when I didn’t know that and I was in a new house with a new problem I just wanted it to feel safe/normal/comfortable again.
So what do you do when the ground feels shaky and you get jittery because something that helped you feel secure – the house, the job, the routine, the accomplishments, the friends, the perfect bill of health, youth itself – are not there anymore? Recently I’ve been practicing living into two things that might apply to your own scary situations.
Trust your Selves
When we feel fearful, sometimes we have to call forward or call back the ancient wisdom of other versions of ourselves. I have been trying to trust past me, who had vision about creating the future I wanted to live into. This move wasn’t a whim. I was trying to set us up for where we need to go.
Author and spiritual teacher Martha Beck has spoken about being in her 20’s, feeling deep despair, and sitting down to meditate. During the meditation, she had a strong feeling of an older, wiser version of herself coming into her consciousness to be with her younger self. 30 years later, in her 50’s, Martha was engaged in meditation and felt pulled to connect with her 20’s self and pull her out of despair. Her theory is that it basically happened in the same event because time is not linear.
Side note – if you want to play with “time is not linear,” combined with Ajahn Chah’s spiritual principal of “the cup is already broken” please watch one of my favorite movies, Arrival, and read Ted Chiang’s (short!) novella on which it’s based.
Although it’s fun to play with nonlinear time, you might be like me and not find it as easy as Martha does; she is definitely one of a kind. A pretty straightforward first step for the rest of us is to look back at our steady past selves and honor their wisdom. Sometimes they got stuff wrong, and we can learn from that. But sometimes they dreamed big and put us right where we need to be, even if it’s scary.
The Flow
Like it or not, I have been tossed into the flow. I was moving’s biggest proponent but when I got really uncomfortable I started looking for escape routes: “Would it be thaaaat weird to just move back to the old house?” It was my kid’s injury that actually forced me to stop fighting it. I couldn’t deal with my crazy mind wishing the injury hadn’t happened or worrying about worst case scenarios. To not feel insane, I was required to meet what was actually happening in the moment and go from there.
Author Geneen Roth and her husband lost nearly all of their life savings to Bernie Madoff, which she describes in her book, Lost and Found: One Woman’s Story of Losing her Money and Finding her Life. She says,
For those first few days after Madoff’s confession, living in my mind was like trying to run on broken glass. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in terror. When I wasn’t crying, I desperately wanted to turn back the clock ten years, two months, even two weeks. I wanted to know then what I knew now and make different decisions about what to do with our money. But since there was no way of going back in time, these thoughts left me crazed and hysterical. I understood for the first time why people cut themselves, banged into walls: It gave them a way to externalize the torture they were living through inside their own minds. When I had exhausted the dreams of going back in time, I’d ricochet to the future…
I am not a go with the flow person. I am a person who is, at my smallest, twisting and manipulating life to fit my vision. I know I am not alone in this and I lose sleep over our modern ability to twist and manipulate life by spending so much time online in our little curated worlds. It’s not just news and social media silos and echo chambers. Online worlds can do this with anything. Vacation planning has gotten out of control because doing it online allows us to feel like if we can be very, very careful, nobody is going to be hurt or disappointed or even inconvenienced.
Going with the flow doesn’t mean that we turn into someone who takes it all and remains unbothered. Rather, going with the flow is consenting to reality and all of the gifts and resources of the present moment. When my kid was hurting, I realized I had a choice to make: living in the broken glass of my mind or meeting life on life’s terms.
Going with the flow meant that I could be sad and scared and held – by loved ones and this new house and by God. In fact, all that I needed to do was wake up to the reality – to remember – that my loved ones and this house and God were already here holding me. “Remembering what I already know” is my most enduring six word memoir for a reason.
