Just around the river bend

There have been a couple notable times in my life when I felt the sheer terror of not having a future. It’s the sensation of staring into a black abyss instead of seeing a well-defined path before me. Over a recent family vacation I was again struck by deep fear for my future, and until I started to breathe into it I judged myself for going back to a place I thought I’d already worked through. This again? After all that work?

But having sat in the grip of the new fear I realized that the sensation isn’t of standing in the Place of Nothing. I sense something coming, and though it feels faint and so far away, I feel motion. Right now it feels like I am paddling down the river of my life and I’m just around the bend from something. I can’t quite tell what it is, because it isn’t a “goal” in the way that all previous paths I’d walked had some definable goal in view. And the fear that can come up around this particular passage is due to the uncertainty of it all. Where am I going and what will I find when I get “there”?

A dear friend offered that the reason I was so hard on myself when this fear came up was because I thought I’d already gone through the initiatory ordeal and was pushing to reintegrate myself with life—”rejoin the world of the living,” as I put it. But she sensed that my caterpillar needed to spin itself another cocoon. I needed another period of nourishment after burning out.

“You can’t know what kind of butterfly you’re going to be until you emerge.” For someone who talks and writes so much about surprise, it’s a little…shall we say hypocritical that I wasn’t willing to wait for this surprise. The old control freak in me wanted to be prepared for whatever it was that was going to emerge, if not dictate when that would happen and what it would look like.

So here I am paddling around my river bend that feels IN-TER-MI-NA-BLE. Read that in the Spanish to draw out the syllables and emphasize just how sin fin this period feels to me. There is a fire in my belly, and I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go. But truth be told, I’m still kind of tired from all the work I’ve been doing for the last five years.

So, once again, here I am paddling around my river bend. This is an exercise in trust, patience, and grace. For the very first time in my life I am moving without any larger plan than the step right ahead of me, and maybe the one ahead of that. I’m leaving the Big Plan to something bigger than myself for now.