Hang on Little Tomato
Autumnal greetings from my couch, where jazz is playing, candles are burning, and my door is open to enjoy the thunderstorm overhead.
It’s been a bit, so here’s a quick catch up. I made it to Italy for three weeks this 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. It was a good trip: difficult in moments, delightful in many more. I was reminded, again, why it is that I love this country so very much: the love of beauty, the spirit of generosity, and the emphasis on connection are all tonics for the soul.
Italy was followed by an eventful summer: my daughter moved into her first apartment, my son returned to university in North Carolina, and I put my home of 23 years on the market. Transition Central here.
One of the interesting things that’s been happening almost daily since the “For Sale” sign went up is the number of people who stop to speak with me. People who haven’t spoken to me in two decades. People I don’t know. People I do. But always, the conversation goes like this:
NEIGHBOR: “I see you’re selling your house! Where are you going?”
ME: “I don’t know.”
And 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.)
It’s been curious and frustrating and sometimes just plain scary not to know what’s next. My human self wants the game plan now, because that would feel safer, more comfortable. But not knowing has compelled me to wait, to really feel the fear and impatience and discomfort. For months.
Wrestling with not knowing brings up much anxiety, to be sure. But it simultaneously invites me to a deeper connection with my higher Self, a Self that reminds 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, and that change and transformation are inevitable, uncomfortable, and ultimately, necessary.
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 larger, more faceted version of ourselves.
When we succumb to our anxiety and grab for something just to have something in hand, to preemptively assuage our anxiety, we delay or even abort the opportunity for growth and expansion. By enduring the discomfort, on the other hand, two things occur: first, we remain open and receptive to receive what wants to happen and second, we allow ourselves to fully ripen, as it were, to be ready for what is coming. Simply put, we grow and transform. We have to grow into our fullness to be big enough to meet our destiny, a destiny that unfurls in the fullness of time.
I don’t yet know where I am going, it’s true. But in the letting go of children, of house, of my grasping for a plan, I am preparing and staying open for whatever it is that is making it’s way to me, be it an idea, an opportunity, a person. And in the right moment, when all is as it needs to be, when the time is ripe and we finally meet, the joy of that “sunny someday” will be worth the wait.
