I am not the only one jolted into looking at the bigger picture. As the media sings its September 11th song of tit-for-tat and eye-for-an-eye, I wonder like so many compassionate spiritual seekers what can I do about a culture of violence and the perpetuation of nonsense. I came upon this haunting quote, from a newsletter for a local yoga and chant festival that usually features beatific women in white singing. Its message of connecting with the chaos rather than pushing it away really touched me. All the smaller questions about codependency and recovery seemed rather self-centered in the face of all this uproar.
What can I do about this? Not just the tragedy in the news, but that feeling that my life is an old movie reel about to disintegrate as the grasping and illusions drop away and I struggle with a deep crisis of meaning . I am coming once again upon the 6-or-7 year itch. Almost six years working for the same company. In the bad-but-consistent days in the 90's and pre-bailout 2000's, I could count on getting laid off before the end of five years–shuffled off by an ungrateful corporation with a few weeks severance package and a brief stint with their career counselor.
In the past, the career counselor would suggest some pie-in-the-sky drastic change and I would promptly ignore them, chosing instead to frantically race around simultaneously sending out resumes and obsessing about the future of my relationship. Avoiding these questions, I relocated to the North Shore to be with my partner and traded one soul-less corporate master for another simply based on its location at the exact mid-point between my temporary digs in Londonderry, NH and my eventual destination of Rockport, MA.
I am still at that company, putting up with the hour-long commute in order to make a Boston salary without facing Boston traffic. I am hardly well-off but too comfortable to seriously consider quitting my job and going back to school. Yet find myself asking myself the questions I started asking, and consequently panicked over, when I was sixteen, twenty, and thirty-two years old. Some judge in my head insists I should know by now, but I am still floundering. What is my life path? What is my unique gift to the world? Now that I am in my forties, with no desire for the family track in my future, how do I navigate the years that (barring some disaster) stretch out ahead of me? How do I make meaning on my own terms, how do I contribute to the next generation?
In the old paradigm it was relatively easy to roll with the punches, but now the punches are coming from the inside as something long dormant wakes up kicking. Any experience of ending—a divorce or breakup, a layoff, a geographical shift—has long been a source of anxiety and imbalance. Despite difficulties at work last year due to my bout with mental illness, I got a fair and honest performance review and even a modest raise. I was waiting for the axe to fall, and when it didn't, that ragged, skin-crawling sensation that my desires had grown too fast and too big for my current circumstances began to set in. I wonder again about the big picture-- my job, my career choices, my plans in the world. I've grieved a major relationship, I've faced a serious mental health diagnosis. I've deliberately spent all of my ill-got gains from my retirement funds—earned from the corrupt banks and insurance companies I worked for in the 90's -on personal growth workshops and now I am deep in a roiling froth of mounting debt and unanswered questions. As an empath, I can feel the burning of the world. Perhaps not in the global sense—I've always been profoundly allergic to politics--still it manifests in the desire to reach out to strangers, or at least respond when they reach out to me. This may in fact be an evolution out of codependency—helping others with the hidden need to prove my own value—into helping others from a self-directed and compassionate place.
When I attended a “mini” HAI workshop this weekend, I got the chance to be a beacon of strength for a struggling, expanding soul new to the workshop experience. Despite my shaky sense of self, I confidently and clearly shared my “experience, strength and hope,” as we say in the Twelve Step fellowships. I listened without judgment, without offering direct advice, simply expressing what I had learned in my growth explorations, and what was working for me in my life. Agitated by hunger, having rushed off to the workshop with only coffee and a handful of trail mix in my belly, I felt oddly grounded in that sense of purpose. I invited this individual out for greasy Greek food in a nearby Mom-and-Pop deli, and I spent the next hour and a half after the two-hour workshop listening to his story.
There is something powerful in reinforcing my commitment to my own path by describing the changes that I have wrought with the assistance of the strong, empowering communities I have been lucky to discover. Could this, I thought, with a burgeoning heaviness in my gut that might have been more than just filo dough and feta cheese, be my True Path? As if in answer I sent my first-ever post to the Emotions Anonymous email loop and the group moderator immediately asked my permission to use it in the monthly newsletter. Could that be the Universe validating this direction-- that someone besides me could benefit from my words? I have been tortured and tormented by my words and my thoughts for so long, freezing and releasing them in poetry and fiction, that I never thought that anything I said could help someone.
Yet I find that when I think of the big picture, how I would want to spend my time if I did not have to worry about financial fears, it would be in a path of “helping people.” In this violently evolving world I no longer want to waste myself in something that doesn't feed me spiritually or make the world a better place. I have no idea how to begin, except with those people in my immediate circles and those met by circumstance or synchronicity. When I fantasize about my ideal career I know I would like to become some kind of facilitator, using my words not for poetry or stories, but as agent of change by acting as witness to powerful expressions of growth, allowing others to find their own self-guided trail and compassionate path.
It seems fitting that I saw this sign at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.
For the past three-and-a-half years I have been on a self-guided trail. Now I am in the center of the labyrinth, moving out of myself and back into the world. As the quotation on the plaque sent to me by one of my dearest friends for Christmas last year says: “She wasn't where she had been, she wasn't where she was going, but she was on her way.” I may not know the exact direction or even really have a map, but it helps to give myself permission to think about those career questions that annoyed and frustrated me years ago, the ones that begin, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with your life?” I know that the frustration and irritation is part of the process of letting go of my self-defeating attitudes and behaviors and embracing the uncertainly and possibility of the future.
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