On the outside, you seem normal. You greet people with a smile and say, “not much, how about you?” You discuss the weekend or an upcoming trip, and the conversation ends. You walk away wondering … “is it just me?”
Underneath your public image, the storm is brewing.
You don’t quite know who you are or what’s next, but you know the change going on inside is beginning to manifest outwardly.
One of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes is that “we make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and the depth of our answers.” It is the time between question and answer in which we are suspended, hanging as it were in the uncomfortable, almost unbearable tension. It is the quality we bring to this experience that determines the depth of our answers.
Stay with the passing
of this moment too
Let the morning song
teach you technique
Touched
with a diminished 9th
Half notes, halftones
Bring back
what was long ago
Be moved
with the intoxicating
Sounds of love
As your horizons broaden and you find yourself less and less conforming, the struggle that was once crippling now begins to bear the fruit of understanding. You look back with compassion for those days that you hung in the balance, not knowing if you would make it. The days it was too big. The days you needed someone or something to assure you that what was being born in you would survive. Those days returning to your memory are astonishingly sacred.
Hold on to whatever is alive in you even though you don’t have the language to express it. In ‘The Timeless Way of Building,’ Christopher Alexander writes, “it is essential that the people shape their surroundings for themselves. Since the patterns are patterns of action, and the action will not happen unless the patterns are felt, and created, and maintained by the people whose action goes into the patterns, there is no way the living town can be built by professionals, for other people to live in. The living town can only be created by a process in which patterns are created and maintained by the people who are part of them.” You are living now in what you’ve spent your life creating. The patterns are a living language where personal development and professional development are inseparable.
This is not just a reinvention; it’s a reorientation best described by the word sentire. “Sentire is the ability to respond to affective changes in your interpersonal environment.” It is a kind of sensitivity where you feel your own state of being and the environment, human and non-human, and make it your own.
