Hang on Little Tomato
I can hardly believe it’s already autumn. I’m still digesting the events of summer, which were big.
I made it to Italy for three weeks at the end of spring, celebrating my birthday in Rome, visiting tiny hilltop towns, and enjoying a week-long walking tour in Chianti with poet David Whyte and 25 wonderful people from all over the world. Italy was followed in quick succession by my daughter moving out, my son returning to university in North Carolina, and me putting my home of 23 years on the market. Transition Central here.
It’s been a lot to adjust to, and I’m still very much in the midst of it all, emotionally and otherwise. One of the interesting things that’s been happening in response to the “For Sale” sign in front of the house is that friends and neighbors (some of whom I honestly don’t even know) will stop to talk as they are walking or driving by, and inevitably the conversation goes like this:
NEIGHBOR: “I see you’re selling your house! Where are you going?”
ME: “I don’t know.”
Here, eyes inevitably open very wide. A few with-it sort of folks exclaim, “That’s exciting!” (Not really. Not yet.) But most people, eyebrows raised in disbelief say, “Really? You don’t know?” (A friend suggested that instead of “I don’t know” I should say, “to France to be with my lover and drink wine and sail,” which is not a bad answer.)
This innocent, if annoying, question pokes at a tender spot in me: not knowing. Not knowing what I’m doing next has felt both frustrating and frightening. My ego wants the game plan now, because that would feel safer and more comfortable. Plans are so very … seductive; they grant us the illusion that we can control our future. But not knowing, and not grabbing at something just to have it in hand, has compelled me to wait, to really feel the fear.
Interestingly, after many weeks (okay, months) of inner frustration and anxiety around the not knowing, a very helpful awareness recently arose. Wrestling with not knowing brings up anxiety, to be sure, but it simultaneously has nudged me into a deeper connection with my higher Self, a Self that reminds me of the wisdom that abides beneath my fears. This wisdom tells me that everything moves in a natural rhythm; that fruit ripens in its natural course; that all transitions begin with an ending and end with a beginning.
In The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo writes, “Often as we are being transformed, we cannot tell what is happening … While struggling with the pain of change, it is often impossible to see the new self we are becoming.” It is precisely in the discomforting, destabilizing process of transition and transformation that we become a “new self,” a more fully realized version of ourselves.
And transitions take time. Bruce Feiler, in his Ted Talk on mastering life’s biggest transitions, says that they can last up to five years. When we go from one chapter of life to the next, it can take some time for us to adapt, to transform. Change is quick, but transformation is not. Think of the caterpillar morphing into a butterfly, or a blossom maturing into a ripe fruit. You can’t stop it, nor can you hurry it along. It takes as long as it takes.
When we preemptively try to assuage our anxiety by filling the void with something—a person or busyness or impulsive action—we delay or even abort the opportunity for growth and expansion. When we do this, circumstances may change, but we do not. We all know the person who goes from one poor relationship to another and laments how they have “bad luck” with men/women, when what’s really happening is that they aren’t taking the time to go deeper. They aren’t taking the time to grow and truly transform. So they have a next chapter, but it is not a new chapter. Same old person, same old story.
Conversely, by staying present and enduring the discomfort of the change and the transition, two important things occur. First, we remain open and receptive to possibilities—perhaps, even, our destiny. Jumping into something too quickly forestalls these possibilities. Secondly, by staying with the process we give ourselves the time that is necessary to grow and become a new self, a self that is then ready to meet its destiny. To put it colloquially, we can either go through something, or we can grow through something.
I don’t yet know where I am going, it’s true. But I do know where I am. And in staying with this process, hanging on through all the emotional weather, I am both preparing and staying open for whatever is making its way to me. And one day, when the time is ripe and everything has reached the edge of a new beginning, I feel certain that my “sunny someday” will be all the sweeter for the wait.
