Week one of October Gauntlets was about physical challenges. Week two is about taking inventory. The tenth month of a year long journey is a good place to focus on this.
“Sometimes we need to take our own inventory to get out of an uncomfortable stuck place, to look at patterns and see what’s going on. Other times, looking at our own behaviors gives us the freedom to finally have, and live, our own lives.” ~Melody Beattie
Well, I certainly have had my share of stuck, uncomfortable places, and now, looking back at my behaviors a year ago, yuck – I don’t ever want to be that person again and if it takes one million yoga classes, massive amounts of art and writing projects, crazy exercise, hours of mediation and intense prayer – I don’t care – I don’t want to go back THERE – therein lies the freedom.
“There” is a time when I was eating people like food. Gobbling up whoever was important to me to insure I didn’t lose them, until the food source was eventually depleted. Then I was left starving and alone with myself. There was only one thing to do to survive. Begin eating away at myself. That was an uncomfortable place to be stuck for months, until one day I suddenly realized if I ate all of myself, where would I live?
That led to months of self-care. Step one to that was to stop fighting. Stop caring. Just plain stop. Stop and surrender it to God. Let Him fight. Let Him care. I stood silent. Standing alone in that silence, while God handled my world, quieted the eating. God understood my need to not even talk to Him. It was the one time it was okay for God to leave me alone. He was busy managing all my affairs and I knew that, and was not scared, not even for a minute. I learned to value being entirely alone with myself during that time.
After six months I turned the corner and began connecting with the world again. Slowly. Carefully. Warily. Now, in this tenth month, I have listened carefully to things that came in that silent time. I get it now. All of it. I was crumpled and weak for awhile, but the best thing is that today I feel twice as strong and more sure-footed than I was before all of it happened. I have not even returned to who I was before it all fell apart. I have truly become someone I never was.
Tried and true. It’s life. We need to be broken to be changed. We hate it. We fear the damn unknown. We yell at God for putting us through it. We almost lose our minds. We almost eat and lose ourselves. But lose we must. Nothing changes without loss. Loss makes room for the new to enter and change us.
This morning, with 2.5 months to go, I sit here on the patio and watch the brown leaves fall just beyond my toes. Even the leaves understand loss. How could I have missed the obvious?
And so, as another day goes by, I let God empty me, bend me, change me, and prepare me for whatever He has planned for me in 2012, and …I have written.
(Damn! Even after ALL this – my glass is still half-full!)
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