2019 has been a long rehearsal of the letting go ceremony my husband and I do each winter solstice. Together, and sometimes with our children, we sit in front of the fire on the longest night of the year and enumerate the fears, grudges, false beliefs and old patterns of thinking that we wish to leave behind as we enter a new cycle of light and outgrow the shell of who we’ve been. We keep each other honest and challenge each other to nail the specifics— not merely to let go of “fear”, but to let go of the “fear of disappointing my significant other if I fail to achieve a perceived ‘up and to the right’ trajectory in my career.” That kind of specific. When we’ve polished the little gems of self-doubt, insecurity, and negative attachment to our satisfaction, we write them down on a clean sheet of paper and throw them into the fire.
This New Year seemed to hold a certain weight as we marked the beginning of a new decade. At 38, the chapters of life have grown in length; there was a time when one year constituted a full chapter, then it was five and now ten. Looking ahead at the next decade, we felt a shared sense that this next chapter demands a degree of authenticity and courage we can both taste, but haven’t yet fully embraced. Two primary questions emerged:
What would it look like if I showed up as my real self in every domain of my life: work, family, relationship?
What is holding me back?
The fears that arose for me were that if I led with the spiritual center of my being, if I fully embraced the hard-fought inner wisdom that has taken root in my life but is not always consistent with an achievement-oriented, capitalist, materialist culture, I will be perceived as less intelligent, less accomplished, and less legitimate. A wise friend suggested that in truth I would become even more like the people I most admire. Hmmmm….
My ego has taken some lumps this year: I took a pay cut, moving from a Silicon Valley company on the verge of expansion to a public school in a role that allows me to serve a wider population and spend more time with my family. I am also launching my own business, stepping out into the unknown, which requires a deep faith that my inner and outer resources are sufficient to the task and that others will perceive value in what I have to offer. I am on the steepest end of the learning curve, which is in many ways my happy place. However, this time there’s a sense that the learning will come less from proving to others that I am capable and more from being incredibly brave with my choices— letting myself be SEEN. I have proven time and time again that I can learn and do hard things. In 2017, I spent five days in excruciating back labor, which ended in a c-section, then three weeks nursing round the clock with a baby who had reflux, and in that same three weeks wrote a 6500 word book chapter, then went back to full-time work without missing a beat. That’s the kind of dangerous over-achieving to which I am preternaturally prone.
But what would my life look like if I didn’t need to prove anything?
Something inside me is waking up to the fact that the old way of doing things is neither sustainable, nor the best way to deliver my soul’s cargo to this world. This awakening has been fueled by some of the great thought leaders and voices of our time (more on that later), but also by old friends who keep reminding me of who I’ve always been. This next chapter is most about the integration of the bookends of life: the energy and courage of youth, guided by the wisdom, humility, and grace of age. The energy of youth is what is required to find and stay on the never-ending path that leads to nowhere and the only place worth traveling to. It is a journey that requires cunning and dangerous— one might say naive— bravado. But the old wise one, who was always there, and becomes more awakened as the journey moves toward its inevitable end, seeks steady footing on the climb, consults the compass, knows that the journey is the destination. This point in my life is marked by the vertigo of disparate, even paradoxical, elements of the psyche finding a way to conspire, and thus interpret the road signs that point the way home. May this be a year of radical integrity, of self-revelation, of trusting the hungry to show up as the cargo is unloaded. I leave you with this profound message in a bottle to usher in whatever chapter is unfolding in the rhythm of your own life.
Cargo
(For Malidoma Some, Loon Lake 2000)
by,
Greg Kimura
You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.
But world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.
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