Here at the start of 2020 I'm wondering how to make best-shareable-sense of my recent end-of-year-review, the emergent tone of the sabbatical period I'm currently in, and a recent realisation I've had as a synthesis of these beautiful conditions in my life.
I was starting out on my morning walk, part of my morning routine, and as I headed out the gate the quiet signal amidst the noise in my head told me to not listen to a podcast this morning, there's a precious thing here that's delicately growing through the understory reaching toward the light. What is it?
Life. Zest for life. Love of life.
Truth is I've been feeling pretty shut down, emotionally, internally. For. A. While. Through 2019. Maybe longer. Not in a devastating way, but not living in a way that's full of heart.
There's a real thing called smiling depression, or high functioning depression. Whole swathes of incredibly smart people enacting productive-and-compliant adult lives cut-off from some internal Truth we should all be living every day. That’s not exactly me. But I do recognise the tone of it, the smell of it. I know what the after-taste is of that thing that you swallow down day after day somehow knowing. There's. Something. Off.
Here's the thing.
I've wanted-to-needed-to go on sabbatical for years. To integrate some stuff. To shed some skins and layers. To allow a settling-of-sediment you just will-not-get-can't-get after two week’s Christmas leave. No. This is something different. This is making room for a signal so weak beneath the undergrowth, faint but relentless. This is what David Foster Wallace meant by the knowing sense of having had, but lost, some infinite thing.
Living according to how the world encourages you to live will do that to you;
“…keep your head down, follow the rules, do as you're told, play it safe, wait your turn, ask permission, learn to compromise ... this is terrible advice.” (Casey Neistat).
I'm walking out the driveway of the house we're staying in for a month of this sabbatical and I ask my True Self. What? What is this nagging sense I know is there but I'm afraid to look at. It's agitating. And scary. And urgent and important. What is it?
This.
Truth. You can live in a way that might look 95% the same way as a fully awake life but it will feel all in gray-scale and hemmed-in by fear and shutdown by unseen forces that are trying to protect you:
Don't over-reach you'll hurt yourself. Don't trust you'll be disappointed. Don't love life so much you'll be heartbroken.
Or you can live in a way that might look 95% the same as a dead safe life but it will feel all in technicolour and HD and thrown wide open with possibility by unseen forces of grace and providence lovingly guiding you.
Go over there you'll see. Try this direction there's a gift waiting. Love your life there's so much more to discover.
And then there’s this other. Thing. This return. To a great mystery. Some kind of religion for atheists. But way less constrained and theist and verbal. And honestly, Rainn Wilson said it best here straight with the cut-through:
The Great Mystery
Gladly raising a glass to integrating these lessons into this gift. The present. This sparkling new decade of hope + optimism.
Happy New Year everyone.
cjG
#mygroundtruth