A friend sent me this short essay yesterday--written by Danaan Parry (The Essene Book of Days). It's kind of scary. It's also kind of wonderful. Like most wisdom writings, it won't do us much good to read it once--in fact it's way too dicey to read just once. You might not be in a place where this makes sense at all, but if you are, it may be one of those perfect bits of insight that will help re-calibrate your Life Compass in just the way it needs at this point in time!
If that's true, read it a lot--work with it--until you consistently can 'just tell' you're navigating life in a way you recognize as your way.
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Sometimes I
feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging onto a
trapeze bar swinging along for a few moments in my life, or hurtling across space
in between trapeze bars. Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear
life to my trapeze-bar-of-the moment. It carries me along at a certain steady
rate of swing and I have the feeling that I’m in control of my life.
I know most
of the right questions and even some of the right answers. But, once in awhile,
as I’m merrily or not so merrily swinging along, I look out ahead of me into
the distance and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me.
It’s empty, and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze
bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to
get me. In my heart of hearts, I know that for me to grow, I must release my
grip on this present, well-known bar and move on to the new one. Each time it
happens to me, I hope (no, I pray) that I won’t have to grab the new one. But
in my knowing place I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar
and for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto
the new bar. Each time I am filled with terror. It doesn’t matter that in all
my previous hurtles across the void of knowing I have always made it.
Each time I
am afraid that I will miss, that I will be crushed on unseen rocks in the
bottomless chasm between the bars. But, I do it anyway. Perhaps this is the
essence of what mystics call the faith experience. No guarantee, no net, no
insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow, to keep hanging on to
that old bar is no longer on the list of alternatives. And so for an eternity
that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark
void of “the past is gone, the future is not yet here.” It is called
Transition. I have come to believe that it’s the only place that real change
occurs. I mean real change, not the pseudo-change that only lasts until the
next time my old buttons get pushed, I have noticed that, in our culture, this
transition zone is looked upon as a “no-thing,” a “no-place” between places. Sure,
the old trapeze bar was real, and that new one coming towards me, I hope that’s
real too. But the void in between? That’s just scary, confusing, disorienting
“no-where” that must be gotten through as fast and as unconsciously as
possible. What a waste!
I have a
sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing and the bars
are illusions we dream up to avoid the void, where the real change, the real
growth occurs for us. Whether or not my hunch is true, it remains that the
transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places. They should be
honored, even savored. Yes, with all the pain and fear and feelings of being
out-of-control that can (but not necessarily) accompany transitions, they are
still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate expansive moments of our
lives. And so, transformation of fear may have nothing to do with making fear
go away, but rather with giving ourselves permission to “hang out” in the
transition zone between trapeze bars. Transforming our need to grab that new
bar, any bar, is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where change
really happens. It can be terrifying. It can also be enlightening, in the true
sense of the word: Hurtling through the void, we just may learn how to fly.”
And fly we
must.
