What if Our Life Could Take Us Someplace New?

What if our life was less transactional and more transportational? 

This is my quest for the New Year. To let go of the wheel. To allow my life to take me someplace new. To not have to be in control. It has the ring of epic disaster. Monumental failure. Or worse.

Perhaps this sounds like synthetic optimism, the thinly disguised cheap veneer of transient aspiration– an overly simplistic and slightly obtuse pipe dream. And, I admit, there does seem to be something naively hopeful about it.

But I assure you, nothing could be farther from the truth.

In order to point the satellite of my 2017 in this new direction, it will require cleaning out a lot of false beliefs and committing, as my acupuncturist has so aptly articulated, to the accelerated digestion of my unconsciousness.

Yeah, that.

It took me a few days to even understand what exactly this meant.

But as I was trying to mentally wrap my head around it, I realized I was smack in the middle of experiencing it on an emotional and spiritual level.

By clearing out the energy paths in my physical body, my acupuncurist had released all the grief and fear and anger that had been blocking it. This has been, ahem, not a terribly light-hearted or fun-filled process.

I spent the better part of Christmas and this past week in tears.

I think it’s the cumulative effect of intersecting life circumstances and events.

According to many developmental theories, women’s lives move in seven-year cycles. This is physical biology– hormones, organs, etc. I will be turning forty-eight in May and I most definitely feel a seismic shift in the plate tectonics of my being.

It is undoubtedly physical but emotional and spiritual too.

Plus, I have experiences a solid amount of loss in the past six years.

My father passed away a month ago, my mother and grandmother-in-law five years ago, my poppop and grandfather-in-law six years ago and in the interim we have had to say goodbye to three dogs.

I have felt sadness, grief and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

However, since my dad died, it has been different. I feel accosted by an emotional avalanche of spiking despair and anger. And far beyond the horizon of loss, I feel quite often, alarmingly lost.

No one explains this. It is, of course, profoundly different for each person. But for me and maybe many, when you lose the foundation of your upbringing, it feels as if you are crumbling. It feels like an internal earthquake amidst an external hurricane.

Invisible catastrophic climate change in the zip code of your soul.

Like waking up on a rowboat in an apocalyptic storm that no one else can see while still trying to raise two boys, maintain a house, be a loving wife, productive creative person and feign social normalcy.

In my moments of clarity, it is crystal clear that this is a fundamental step in my evolution. That it is life offering me a way to let go of what doesn’t serve me and rally around what does.

It would be nice to arrive at ‘found’ without first being ‘lost’. But it would be unrecognizable. Take Dorothy without her travels through Oz or Telemachus minus his epic odyssey.

It is the journey through darkness that lets the light shine differently.

This sounds like opportunity.

And it is. But it also means the disillusion or distancing of relationships that no longer seem to be in alignment with where my life wants to take me. Relationships with ways of being I have outgrown but still cling to for safety.

Like fear I am not artistic, generous, articulate, healthy, creative, spiritually evolved, emotionally stable enough.

Like frenetic productivity as a badge of self-worth. Like trying to be a good person over being simply, me. Like saying yes to things that provide me stress. Like assuming if I don’t do the task at hand, it will be done wrong.

What if it the value of our life is about more than measurable results?

More than a quantifiable list of accomplishments? What if we stop judging ourselves, and others for what we do or don’t do? What if we stop prioritizing our time according to what yields the greatest productivity?

Even conversationally.

What if we have more than a running tab of downloads, uploads and pithy sound bytes? More than parallel monologues? What if we dare to carve out enough room for our own dreams and disappointments so that we have room for others?

It’s a radical proposition.

But maybe the time has come. Up until recently the idea of doing nothing (as in staring out a window or going for a (non-cardio) walk filled me with dread.

I mean, who is going to clean out the kids dressers, go grocery shopping, write the new business deck, burn off the excess holiday calories? And more importantly, when???

Any non-accounted-for units of time were a missed opportunity to maximize usefulness. And if I am not being useful, than…

What am I doing? And why?

These are exactly the questions I’d like to ask but from a different perspective. Instead of assessing them according to how they measure my usefulness, I want to change the framework.

I want to see myself less as a transactional machine and more as a spirit on a grand adventure. I want to pay attention to where my life wants to take me this year.