Say Yes

I was going to give this post a dramatic opening like, “Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to start over.”  But then I realized, Life is ALWAYS giving us chances to start over!  (I frankly think that Life has given me more “Start Over” passes than I really needed, but I’m not the Grand Hoohah in Charge of Everything.) 

Every moment, every situation is a decision point and we either say “yes” or “no” to it.  Most of the time, we just keep doing what we’ve done in the past, so it doesn’t FEEL like a “yes” or a “no” but it actually is.

When you got up this morning, you fixed your coffee.  You could have had green tea.  You could have had water.  You could have had Jack Daniels.  But if you’ve made coffee every morning for decades and decades, well then, you probably had coffee.  But it was still a decision. 

Let me more accurately say, then, that sometimes life’s circumstances more or less force you to make a decision to start over.  And it’s not easy, ever.  Even if you had the chance to move to the French Riviera and work as a sous chef while living on the yacht of a benevolent millionaire, it’d still be hard because you’d be leaving where your comfort is.  Your home, your friends, your habits, your niche in the world.  You’d be going out to carve a new niche in an unfamiliar place among strangers. 

Human beings resist change.  We just do.  In travail were we born, and in travail are we re-born. 

I believe most of you know that I have packed up my toys and moved back to Texas, where my family lives.  I had always planned to return to Dallas when needed; I was only "on sabbatical" in California.  But after eleven years in the Golden State, it is a grand-scale starting over for me.  And I’m not going to be a hero and say that it’s easy.  It’s stretching me way beyond my tensile strength.

But here’s what’s great about starting over.  It strips away all your faces, who you are to friends, what you’re good at, what you like to do, who you know, what others think of you.  When you leave everything behind, all you have is you... the you so far below the surface as to escape notice most of the time. 

It’s desolating to strip away all the coverings, to be simply and solely myself, not any role I might have played as a friend or employee or member of a group.   But starting over gives me the chance to just “be” for a little while.  I’ll get busy soon enough and feel like an adult again but for now, I’m just my interior self, a child. 

There is something profoundly good about that state, despite the ache.  It’s the state to which we are all destined: going forward into the unknown with nothing to recommend us but who we are inside.

I wouldn’t have asked for this, my insides fought and resisted it, I was scared silly.... but it is good to be a child, a blank slate, in the loving hands of One who has promised to be with me and for me, now in my practice forays, and later when I leap into the unknown for the last time.  Life is giving me the chance to say “yes.”