Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Working With Transitions


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.