All through my life there have been ups and downs. Some were just life circumstances, and some were the result of others changing plans that everyone else thought were set in stone. As high as one can soar through life, there are equal lows that can happen. I find, though, that it is what we do with those lows that counts the most.
I come from a family of survivors. My ancestors have survived war, famine, persecution almost to the point of extinction, deaths of various forms, some of which were quite tragic as well as intentional, and so on. They have survived these things not because they were designed to. They survived because they had to. Yes, some of the events burned their way into the consciousness, like a hot brand on flesh. Those have always been held as a reminder of how things can go very wrong if we are not filling our lives with care.
Sometimes we must decide what parts of our past (ours personally or ours genetically/ancestrally) we need to let go of so that they do not weigh us down, and what parts of our past we are going to carry with us because they give us strength. For example, my parents grew up in the Great Depression. Things became extremely scarce where they once were abundantly available. This created in them a strong sense of lack. This sense of lack got passed down to my siblings and myself. We each, in our own way, had to come to terms with that baggage and sort out how it was or was not going to affect our lives. Abundance and wealth became an issue for many of us. Some of us healed that trauma from our ancestors and have moved forward into abundant lives. Some have not. The flip side of that coin of “lack” has to do with resilience and knowing how to creatively manifest what we need. We have that as a gift from the hardship of our ancestors. But we do not need to carry the shadow of it along with the gift.
Disappointments happen. Sorrow happens. Tragedy happens. Things can get really dark very quickly. We sometimes feel like we have come to a dead end in our lives. But if we allow ourselves a bit of a grace period we can often find that the dead end was actually a curve in the road. Because we have not yet taken that curve we do not actually know what is around the corner. With that grace period we are able to process what the road behind us was and come to terms with the changes that are happening right now. We assess what we are carrying forth with us from what was, and what we must let go of in order to lighten the load. Only then can we make the journey around that curve in the road and find a different destination than the one we thought we were headed towards.
This sometimes happens with friendships. Something that we have become accustomed to starts to change. We can flow with the change or we can fight it. Sometimes the change brings us closer together. Sometimes it drives us apart. Either way there is a curve in the road and we have to decide how it is we are going to respond. For example, I have a friend (I will call her A) and she had another friend (B) whom I also knew. When A moved to another city for work she would make sure to make plans to see all her friends whenever she came back into town. But when she would contact us all ahead of time to make arrangements all she would hear from B was the sound of crickets. For two years she tried to connect with B. She was heartbroken. After awhile I began asking her what this situation might be telling her? She finally had to admit that none of her other friends treat her that way and she had to just let B go. B always had an excuse (mostly flimsy at best), but the point was that she was not seeing herself as being capable of maintaining a distance relationship with A. And A got tired of putting all the work into maintaining it. Once she let B go, B started wanting to arrange a get together with A. They met and, after about three hours of hashing it all out, they mutually decided that the freindship was, indeed, done. Now, I have to insert here that if I was A I would not have even taken the meeting. If someone treats me with such blatant disregard they are DONE. I do not need to hash anything out with them. But, I am a dude and dudes deal with these things differently. I am also an Aquarius, so I tend to see the curve coming in the distance and make a plan for how I will handle it. That is just me.
One of the most shocking curves in the road in my life was when I woke up to a dead wife. I know, right? I remember when I heard one of my parents’ friends talk about that happening to him the night his wife died from an aneurysm. I was around ten years old when I heard this story and I thought to myself that I would NEVER want to experience such a horrible thing. Fast forward forty some years and BAM, there it was, happening to me (well, the death happened to HER…it is not all about me) and I frankly went into a state of shock. That shock lasted weeks. People thought that I was not grieving because I was not a puddle of tears. I got alot of criticism about that. But, had they even stopped to consider the experience of it, they may have clued into the fact that I WAS IN SHOCK. So, of course my responses were not the same as what Hollywood, or even Bollywood, portrays grief to be. Once the shock wore off I was a mess. Yes, I still functioned because I had to, but inside and in the middle of the night I WAS NOT OKAY. But nobody saw that part of it. There truly were moments when I just wanted to end the pain and opt out of this life, but I could not do that to my children, so I suffered in silence and did the work of walking through the grief and found a way to take furtive looks around the curve in the road just to see if there might be some relief. And yes, eventually there was. And today one would never know that I had experienced that unless I shared it with them (or if they read about it here). Part way through the grief work I was visited by my mother’s spirit. She told me that if our ancestors could survive family members being murdered in Nazi Germany, then I could show them that I, too, had some resilience within me. After all, that resilience was hard earned by my ancestors, so I had better work this out and get on with the living world. That was the kick in the butt I really needed.
When the curve in the road involves the death of someone close to you it changes you FOREVER. The worst possible thing has happened and it makes everything else around you change as well. Or at least our perspectives of everything else changes. I have personally found that it changed me in a number of ways. First, my threshold of tolerance for people’s bullshit has diminished. And those who hand out the bullshit very quickly find out that there is a line that they have crossed and they instantly regret it. Second, my boundaries have increased (the flip side of the coin to having no tolerance for bullshit). But those boundaries also tend to make me more reserved than I used to be. The social butterfly part of me is now tempered with wisdom and knowing what I am willing to venture into and what I am not. When people start getting gamey with me I become a ghost in their lives because I do NOT HAVE TIME for that type of behavior. Third, my appreciation for those I am close to has increased. When you are in, you are IN, and I will move heaven and earth to support and protect you. I know that life is too short for drama and games. So if someone I love is having those things put upon them, I teach them how to repel it or, if they need me to, I will step in and squash it. Fourth, I have learned how to better let go of things that really hold no energy for me. I release my need for sentiment and nostalgia and live my life free from expectations that others would place upon me. Sometimes, as a result of that and the fact that I cannot be guilt tripped, people think that I have become a cold-hearted bastard. That is so untrue. I have simply let go of any need to serve anyone else’s agenda. Has that lost me friends and even family members? YES. But I am better off without them in my life if all they can do is try to guilt trip me. I don’t appreciate folks who try to manipulate me. I remember a few years ago being approached by someone who was trying to sell me something. I told them “no.” They tried to talk me into it, even talking over me. I finally told them, “No is a complete sentence in and of itself. If you don’t understand that, then that is a YOU problem.” and walked away.
Even though some of the curves in the road can be harsh in content, I do rather enjoy the fact that, as a result of some of them, I have become more bold. Yes, I am still all zen and gentle natured. But when I am pushed that boldness comes out with a ROAR. This is extremely liberating. And, let’s face it, Providence loves boldness. So, BE BOLD.