Powered by Acceptance
I confess to the gloomiest holiday period I’ve experienced in a long time at the end of last year. The last time I had the blues like these was back in the pivotal year-end of 2005. And both times were after a serious transition year. 2005 and 2013 – while the rest of the world moves on a seven year cycle, mine must be an eight year one.
I think I’ve spent an eternity hurrying up to get to where I want to be rather than being where I am. To live like this means to measure out transitions and life changes in minutes, days, weeks and months. How long does it take for someone to transition? How long to grieve what you have left behind?
Because I move fast once I take a step or rather a leap, a lot of times the collateral damage takes a long time to confront me and for me to process it. Most people process and then step, I dive and take stock long after I’ve leapt. There is no right or wrong way to move through life, to evolve, or to move up to a new wrung of the spiral.
However, I do want to give the blues a place in my life. I had the blues and kept spiraling downward until I realized there is no bottom to the blues. I felt lonely because I missed being a part of a family and this goes all the way back to being a kid when I was the youngest of six siblings of a large and boisterous clan and it takes me through three marriages and other partnerships into my present day.
I felt overwhelmed by the work I want to do and the work I must do to take care of myself and my son financially.
I felt sad over dreams from the past that were dashed and destroyed.
I felt fear of uncertainty that the New Year would bring perhaps the same old thing all over again and there is a weariness in my bones of having to deal and to process and to act.
And then suddenly I felt light, the burden and blues were lifting, and I started coming back to what has helped me – Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Flower’s often shared Russian wisdom, Judi Dench’s quote from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: “Everything is going to be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” And even my father’s wisdom that the darkest hour is just before dawn.
Every time we give birth to a new idea, a new way of being, ourselves, we walk through a threshold and the resistance we meet is our own – fear – and the only way to get through is to accept what is and move along. That acceptance of what is, what is now, dissolves regret and sadness and doesn’t give light to anxiety and fear – it is only living in the now.