Lately, I feel like I’ve been floating down a tepid stream of ambivalence.
Dawdling along, picking at the edges of my life, reluctant to fully commit to a day, a task, a project.
I want to watch movies and nap, read books, walk the dog and bake.
(At this point baking requires eating what I bake, so I’m steering clear of that as much as possible.)
There is lots to do. I have plans. The plans are more or less in action when I can heave myself away from whatever screen I’m watching to act on them.
Today I stumbled on a quote from an article on running of all things, written by Daniel Lennox.
“Sometimes, isn’t it so that in forgotten spaces, at the margins of hope, something special unfurls?”
It strikes me that I find myself living in the place of forgotten spaces, pushing off and away from those margins of hope. Not quite allowing myself to stay there, to see what might happen if I did.
The other thing is that I know is that something special is unfurling.
It’s just slow. Slow is not my comfort zone.
I am a fast person. I walk fast, think fast, eat fast. I’ve learned patience through practicing the extremely irritating adage, “The reward of patience is patience.”
I get it; I’m re-configuring. I’m the butterfly in the cocoon with mushed up cells. I am morphing into a deeper, more authentic version of myself and becoming the butterfly.
Yet I feel the weight of my life pressing from behind. Roads not taken, choices made from times where I was not anchored into myself shaping my present.
Planting doubt instead of trust, a delightful game I can dip in and out of on a bad day, fear nipping at my heels as the forgotten spaces come into focus. This apathy and hesitancy will pass, I tell myself, and it does.
Plus, I’m lucky, because my story magically surfaces in the readings I give.
It means I get to see not just the margins of hope, but beyond those margins, in the lives of the people, I get to work with.
It helps me to remember that hope is only showing the way to what is beyond, which I think is love, by which I mean big love, universal energy love, the source of everything kind of love.
I think maybe hope and forgotten spaces can be directions to head back home to myself, an invitation to remember to love myself as I am loved and as I love.
I’ve said that I write to know what I’m feeling, but I also see that I write to understand what I know and what I need to learn, even if it is slow.
A work in progress, that’s me. Cookies anyone?
(Photo by Chris Gonzalez)
