Blog from a boat

I had a conversation recently that upended a belief that I didn’t know needed a little tending to. I had not realized how limiting that thought had been for me until I heard it questioned out loud in a genuinely kind and curious way. It was a profound reminder that we are often most blind to what is right in front of our nose and what we think we have already mastered.

I have often said that this year is a bridge, from a past life into a new one. That I am currently in the liminal space of the in between. Neither here nor there, but somewhere entirely different. This is a nice little pause, but not quite reality and soon I will have to transition out of this space and into my next life.

I have been shaken into the understand of how much friction this idea is causing to my being right now. As I am slowly ending this self proclaimed sabbatical, I have been feeling a lot of things. After this conversation, I am realizing that I am the creator of this challenge, per usual!

I have loved this past year. I have created magic this past year. I have found so much harmony and peace and so many other things I was seeking. Most of what I have found, I stumbled on within myself. In essence, I have created a life I absolutely adore living.

This belief that I hold, that this is simply a liminal space and nothing more, is inaccurately forcing me to believe that I must give this life up in order to begin this so called “new” life. It is as if my brain wants life to be a straight forward path and any deviation is a detour. But what if life is the detours and the path is an illusion. Or perhaps, it’s all an illusion and whatever we name it as, it becomes.

The all consuming grief of this belief, that I must end this life to renew, is breaking my heart before anything even happens. Funny enough, I thought I had worked through this exact thing so many times before. I thought I fully integrated the idea that life is a winding path that is unknown to us but always designed perfectly for who we are meant to become.

But here I am, thinking it is time to get off this lovely little detour and back onto the straight path I perceive is meant for me. This expectation of what I must become in order to move forward is inadvertently naming this current place I am in as a time consuming detour that has slowed down my life. It is creating a story that this current life is not real, only a break from a real life that is waiting for me at the end of this detour.

There is a place in my subconscious that thinks that once the calendar flips to 2025, my life will require me to step out of this life and into my next. Leaving all this beauty behind. I hadn’t realized how much this was impacting me until this vulnerable conversation that comically required us to shout above the noice of a boat engine the whole time. My throat may have been a bit hoarse but my heart was opened.

I’m sitting in a space of curiosity right now. Questioning how this is going to shift everything for me moving forward. How can I hold space for this belief while also letting it go. Knowing it no longer serves me to see my life as a straight and narrow path forward.

I have always loved the detours, or whatever you want to call them. The moments that life knocked you sideways in uncomfortable ways but led you exactly where you needed to be eventually.

This is life. This is all we have. For me to be fully accepting of this, I still have so much work to do. I must release the idea that I have stumbled off the path designed for me if life doesn’t appear as I expected. It always comes back to expectations, of course!

These tricky things that our brain creates to help us feel safe in a future that can never be known. Just now, I’m remembering that a little over a year ago, my very first blog written on my travels, was about expectations!

Oh how far I’ve come while also circling the same drain! Life is a silly thing, indeed!

I am very much in the messy middle of this right now. I can’t draw any neat conclusions of what I will do next. But I do know that I am endlessly grateful for the people in my life who meet me with kindness and curiosity.

I suppose this is an abrupt remembering that the future is always unwritten. No matter how certain tomorrow feels, it is only a story in our mind until it has arrived. We always have a choice to live in this constructed story or to pull ourselves back to the present.

I’m choosing to zoom back into the now. I’m choosing to shift away from calling this year a bridge, a liminal space or a detour. I am living, right now, the best way I know how. And that is something too beautiful to step away from.