Many people are waiting for life to settle down. At times, I fall into the same anticipation. But maybe the belief that we experience small ruptures and then life settles down is an illusion? Maybe it just keeps changing and what we haven’t accepted is the need to grow and run with life’s iterations differently. Remaining naive to that trips us up.
Engaging in a relationship with a life long partner is the beginning of a journey. It never ends. Commitment is the first experience. Many, many more follow. Careers, children, extended families, dislocation, relocation, economic circumstances all make unforeseen demands on what started out as a safe space for two people. That space comes and goes. How does a couple go back to what it was when everything has changed?
Having a child is also just the beginning. Parenting is a long learning trajectory. Health issues, neurological individuality, learning difficulties, changes that come as new areas of the brain activate through adolescence and early adulthood. All need navigating and support. Throw in the challenges of modern technology, drugs and alcohol, school dynamics, and family restructuring, parenting demands that we frequently hit the ‘refresh’ button.
And as we age, death and illness appear with increasing frequency. Colleagues and partners die unexpectedly through heart attacks. Cancer eventually makes an appearance. Parents become frail, needing intensive support to organise living arrangements and care. Chronic illnesses emerge interfering with daily activities and ease with activity outside the home. Everything changes with the appearance of these factors in our daily lives. Most notably our internal realities. Once the realisation that life is random and finite has birthed into conscious awareness, nothing shifts it. Our inner stability is shaken. For some, it is too much and life stops.
Once any of these events have entered our personal narratives, life never returns to ‘how it was’. The events catapult us from one reality to another.
How do we cope? Do we numb the discomfort with whatever means we have available? Do we grit our teeth and hope that eventually it will all settle? Or do we acknowledge this is how things are? Change, disruption, the call to be more than what we were yesterday is the one constant we can expect.
For those of us who write, or create in any form, is the knowledge that an internal space of creation is always available. Know it intimately enough and we eventually know that ‘it’ is the only constant. It is the quiet centre of the storms that swirl around us. It is the space out of which human resiliency emerges, the space in which who we are resides, the part of us that knows we can handle whatever comes our way, even if that demands ongoing small deaths of what we think ourselves to be, intertwined with unending small resurrections from within of our infinite essence.
Internal death and resurrection. Our true nature and the antithesis to a perspective that says we need ‘forever’ external stability and perfection. Stability resides within. The small deaths and small resurrections are our innate perfection. Write to reveal them.
Georgina Mavor 