picked up this really nifty plugin that rotates quotes with every page refresh (catch it in the left sidebar) from the fine folks over at www.zaadz.com (who also rock for many other things!).
every once in a while it will throw a quote at me that makes noise when it lands. you know, like a bell being struck… or the tin can hitting tile… or sometimes, something less romantic.
the ‘quote of resonance’ for today is:
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. – Henry Miller
had anyone told me 2006 was going to be the year of awakening on so many levels, i’m not sure if i would have laughed… or tried to hide… or just tossed the last of my sanity like confetti in their face.
i don’t know about you, but the time from conceptualization to intellectualization to realization to embrace is fairly short here. it is not always a blessing. most times, it really feels like a curse.
and i find it is only when i try to set speedbumps down that i really wind up hurting. but you know, sometimes, you just really do not want to accept things.
which is weird, because i haven’t hit a realization yet that i wasn’t ultimately better for finding. so why did so much of 2006 make me want to curl up and do the ‘la la la’ song?
i didn’t want to admit i was starting over. hah. as if i could deny it. but i sure did try.
i didn’t want to admit i was scared of it.
i didn’t want to admit my entire foundation and worldview had been torn up and flung down like an inconvenient weed.
i didn’t want to admit i was no longer sure of myself. or that i wasn’t even sure what to do.
so much of my life has been spent having to know all those things. not just know them, but know them so fully, so well, that i could be on ‘autopilot’ through horrors and abuses and still manage to make it to where i most felt i needed to be.
to be in a moment when i no longer felt i knew any of them… well… it was fooking scary.
and oddly enough, it set me into patterns of behavior or into accepting patterns of behavior that i would never have otherwise permitted in range. most of them were good. some of them were obscenely bad. but all of them taught me things.
and even now, i look at this paragraph and say to myself, ‘the good was bad and the bad was good and both were nothing at all.’ i feel the truth in that… even as i’m not yet to a point where i can really absorb it.
it’s like standing near a furnace when you’ve got hypothermia. probably not the best way to get warm, but it sure beats freezing to death.
i realize something else, too. most of this year i’ve been keeping myself distracted from dealing with any of it by setting my focus so completely elsewhere (work, others, gaming, etc) that i could alllmost pretend it wasn’t there.
almost.
the universe has done a fairly thorough job of chipping away at those distractions. and of introducing new others and circumstances that have nudged and pushed and pointed me to what has seemed like something of a corner in many moments.
in talks with a new friend of late, much of this finally makes the transition from being intellectualized to being realized. that’s always the hardest part. the space between realization and embrace is usually slim to non-existent.
i am starting over. at 41.
it is scary as anything i can convey. scarier even than most things i’ve experienced, and that covers a lot of ground. scarier because those experiences were things that others were doing to me, and all i had to do was survive. survival was easy. this is going to require more.
practically everything i believed in has been set to ashes by the last six-seven years. many, many things i would once defend as inviolate i cannot even pretend to support anymore.
i have not felt truly certain about myself or my place in the world for quite some time.
even now, i often feel as if i’m simply following whichever path seems the most obvious in any moment, hoping i’m not any blinder than i think i am, and relying on the universe in ways i would not have dared attempt “before”.
i can tell things are changing because i can write all of that and the only thing i feel is a sense of them being correct. almost pure, if that makes sense.
and really, that’s kind of what is prompting this post. maybe it is the new year. maybe it is simply flushing out the last bits of grit from ‘the system’. maybe it’s just becoming more open to the world and others. maybe it’s Buddhism. i suppose it could be any number of things, really… and i’m not sure it really matters which or which combination it is… but for my incessant curiosity to understand myself well enough to manage making this change more than momentary.
i can feel this change happening. it isn’t scary. it’s actually kind of exhilarating. and i suppose i want to know…. hah… well… there you have it. i still ‘want to know’.
but i’m starting to learn that knowing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.