I remember listening to a CD by Sonia Choquette a couple of years ago, about those days, or times of our lives, we all experience when everything seems wrong, out of sync or just plain cruddy. Rather than resisting the situation, pouring all our effort and energy into trying to change it, she recommends we find what exactly it is we need to cope with the circumstances, to find peace and acceptance.
This is simple, yet profound counsel. However, while it may be simple in concept, it can be difficult in practice.
Firstly, we have to know ourselves, our desire, well enough to know what works for us. Most of us don’t even know what we need in any given situation, let alone know how to find it and acquire it.
Then we have to be able to listen to the dictates of our own heart without allowing it to be hijacked by the needs or demands of others. Most of us have been raised to believe that we should meet others’ needs before our own, that anything less is selfish. And yet, how can I share my oranges with you if I have none in my basket?
Choquette is right because just doing what we think we should be doing is unsustainable in the long term. We can only keep it going for so long. Eventually my empty basket impoverishes everyone in my life.
We find the insight and inspiration to determine what would make the circumstances bearable in the short term, and transformative in the long term, by looking within.
i remember a time when I was so down and depressed I would have been happy to end it all. It was 18 months after Ian had died and I had just moved my son into the college that his sister was already living in. I was sitting in my empty house wondering WTF I was doing.
The irony of my situation was excruciating. Since the birth of my daughter 20 years before I had been (almost literally) counting the days when it would just be Ian and me again - what I used to call, our pure selves (without all the complications of parenting and family life). For two decades I felt Ian was the love of my life - he was certainly my sense of home, the fulcrum around which my heart and soul centered. With Ian in my heart and life, everything seemed possible.
Now here I was - both of my kids successfully through school and into the University courses of their choice and optimistically launched into their new adult lives - sitting in my empty house with no one to care whether I got out of bed each morning or not.
I confided in my friend Alison that I was having increasingly urgent suicidal thoughts. She posed this question: what would I do if I could do anything? What plan could get me excited about life again? In Choquette’s terms, what did I need to be ok with my situation, without trying to change it or resist it, but to work with it?
I went home and meditated on this. I immediately knew I had to get out of my head. To do this, I had to change my surroundings. I already had a trip to Europe planned, my departure four weeks away. I called the travel agent, changed my flights and left within seven days.
I jumped on and off trains and buses all around Scotland and in my quiet meditative moments I had some of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life, nothing like I had ever experienced before. So many things that I believed, hoped, suspected to be true were now physically manifesting so that I now knew them to be true.
Like my kids, I was now launched on a whole new path, and life. It made old habits, routines and attitudes irrelevant, blasting beliefs about myself and the possibilities of what my life could look like into a whole new stratosphere; now, my life looks absolutely nothing like the life I had for 20 years as wife and mother.
And it all came from that simple question: what do I need to make this ok for me?; and then being prepared to listen to, and act on, the answer.
