I am in what feels like a huge phase of disconnection. I suspect that, on the far side looking back, it will not be so huge and the lack of connection will not seem nearly as dramatic. Most of us will acknowledge, however, that when you’re in a thing, it’s larger than life. And there it is.
This particular part of the “personal growth” dealie is one of my least favorites – the evaluation of where your recent decisions have taken you, how the gains and losses in life are balancing out, and whether or not your current relationships are adding or subtracting from a general sense of purpose and well-being.
I am fairly brave when it comes to assessing the success or failure of a singular decision, action or coordinated effort. I am not too terrible at telescoping back out to The Big Picture to see how I’m doing overall in terms of my hopes, dreams, goals and general karma. It is in being brave enough to really see and admit to shifts in my relationships where I fall short. That is where the horse puckey hits the fan.
People have an ebb and flow to them – lovely little bags of water that we are. While we would like to be constant, would like to hold a course from its beginning to its end, we drift so much more than we realize … and are pulled in a gazillion different directions all of the time. We can be compassionate and cooperative always, but I am currently wondering if it’s beyond us to be constant. I think some people change and evolve in the same location and circles of friends over time, so that it would seem they are constant, but what really has stayed true is their environment … and not they themselves. I know a great number of people who feel they cannot or should not leave the place they have always lived or the friends they have always known, even if they wish they could – for even just a little while.
I am not constant. I might even be volatile. And this is becoming a greater factor as I get older; I see something that’s not working in my life and I want to move away from it pronto… decision to action in 4.2 seconds. This is not a sparkles-and-rainbows way to live, because it makes you someone who is always poised to sever connection instead of someone waiting to see how the story turns out, how you might’ve gotten it all wrong. And so I am struggling to practice patience when my insides are screaming “Eject!” To help me balance, I withdraw and try to focus on just myself … take it back to the source, however unsettling and typically boring that is.
I am not currently reaching out a lot. I’m sure that some of my friends who have tried to keep tabs on me recently have found me elusive and irritatingly unresponsive. It is nothing personal. I am simply hanging very close to home and trying to have some fun … to stabilize and not over-react in a period where I do not feel close to many people. It would be too easy to “clean house” … to move from a healthy kind of isolation to a not-very-healthy self-imposed one. So, I am doing a bit of surfing and writing and riding my bike – little activities designed to keep peaceful about change and letting things go the way they will of their own accord.
Intellectually, I know that this is a phase, but it is still hard just letting myself feel disconnected until I don’t anymore. It goes against our Western “hurry up and fix this” urgency. It takes a totally different mindset – not “Good gods, what do I have to do to make the path clear?”, but “Does it need to be?”
