I have always talked about change in reverse order. Before something new can unfold (a beginning) there first must be an ending. Endings are uncomfortable. They involve loss, risk and grieving as relationships and habits are broken apart. Healthy endings, in my mind, are those approached mindfully, with ritual guiding us through the good byes. I have just been through a period of endings, leaving my career, and more significantly, breaking with the people who I worked with each day.
I still feel some of the sorrow of those endings, but I did what I could to create meaningful rituals with those I was parting ways with. I am now looking back at a world I was immersed in, knowing my relationship with it is forever changed. So where am I now? Now I am in the messy middle stage of change, where pieces of my old life linger and I am trying to make meaning out of what will come. I don't have the old and I don't have the new. It is a chaotic and ungraceful time. One of the reasons I arranged this week is so that I could clear my mind and heart and begin to weave a new tapestry here in that messy middle.
Have I been successful at that? My answer is "maybe" and "a little." I do not yet have a clear roadmap for the new beginning in my life, but I can see it on the horizon. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I can feel it on the horizon. I am learning to sit with my questions and even to tolerate the messy middle, and recognize that it has value. I am trusting my own inner compass. With this inner compass, I can let myself wander (and even get lost for a while), while knowing I have the tools to navigate and find my way forward. I just need to know where north is on that compass, and what I have learned this week is that my north is not a place or a career, but a way of being. It is a who before it is a what or a how.
Here on my last day of seven, the skies blackened and rain fell. It is helpful to have a compass you can trust on dark days, and this is something I know I have. It is painful to think of packing up and leaving this place, my heart's home, but I am not really ending my time here. I am beginning. “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” T. S. Eliot
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