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The shift?! I'm not exactly sure when it occurred. It might
have been in one moment or in countless. I think that perhaps it was a
bit of both. How could a conservative, sits in the corner, and
do-the-right-thing type of girl become a woman dancing with passion, in
a bar, on top of a speaker? Or, better yet, how could she not?!
This past summer was one of the most challenging of my life. I spent my
time trying to figure out the reason for my existence. I'm only 27 and
there I sat with a husband, two children, a business, a mortgage, and a
load of questions about how the hell I ended up in this position
without being aware of it. I struggled to find a sense of joy in my
"mundane", boring, life and kept coming up with what-ifs. What-if I had
waited a couple of years to marry and had gone abroad? What if I hadn't
shunned the birth control pill because of the hormones and had used it
consistently? What if I had continued with nursing, paper-science,
journalism? What if...? One of my moments of
clarity came on a Sunday afternoon on the deck of a friend's house.
After a few drinks we began talking about our lives. We were all
approximately the same age and we were all experiencing the same
dissatisfactions. I could have cried with joy. I wasn't alone. Other
people my age were going through the same thing. It turns out that what
I believed to be my own little crisis was something that is a passage
of life. John Mayer's term for it is "quarter life crisis". I
wholeheartedly agree. Never before had I wanted to run away, buy a
convertible, and find some beautiful 18-year-old blond to hang on my
arm. But that is exactly where I found myself. Dissatisfied, confused,
but no longer alone. At that point I realized that
if something was going to be done to change the way I was feeling, I
would be the one who would end up doing it. I sat down and looked at my
life from many different angles and thought up a list of things I
really wanted to be doing. I then formulated a plan on how to get
there. I'm still working on most of these ideas but I began moving in
the directions that I needed to be. I started to be very aware of
everything that I consumed, physically, mentally, and spiritually. I
started to move. I took a dance class and made it a point to get some
form of movement in on a regular basis. I started realizing the beauty
in my life. My amazing children and husband blew me away with their
beauty. My friends were reflections of me in ways I had never seen
before. Blessings abounded left and right and my confidence changed. It
morphed into something it wanted to be all along. My dull life was
anything but. Every moment held wonder and beauty and meaning. I was so
happy to be alive. So on that fateful Saturday night in the company of
some wonderful friends, I found myself on a speaker, dancing as if no
one and everyone were watching. Finding glory in just moving, finding
glory in being me, and finding the glory in my continued ascension. Up
black speakers and in life.
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