Beauty and Terror

“Let everything happen to you
 Beauty and terror
 Just keep going
 No feeling is final” 

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m thinking about these words from Rilke as I navigate through this liminal space. 

One of those in-between places where almost every part of my life is up in the air. Waylaid from the path I was on, and uncertain where I’ll land next. 

My instinctual reaction was to resist the change. I refused to relinquish control of how my life should unfold. I held onto outdated ideas and beliefs about what I should achieve or accomplish. Burying myself with work, noise and distractions. Anything to drown out my inner knowing.

I subconsciously sabotaged any opportunity that came along which didn’t align to the predetermined goal I had set for myself.

I played the role as if I had the script and knew my lines.

And that's how I lost myself. The more I resisted, the more I stagnated. 

In resisting where I was, I held myself captive to a narrative that was no longer true to who I was becoming. 

It’s hard to look at the path not taken and potential left unrealized without succumbing to despair and disillusion. We only get one chance at this life thing. There are no dress rehearsals, no do-overs. 

Sometimes we’re so eager to hurry through the lulls and detours and go straight to the Good Part. But maybe the digression is the good part. Maybe, as Alan Watts put it, we miss the point the whole way along: to sing or to dance while the music was being played. 

Because, it turns out, deviating from the path I was on wasn’t evidence my life was falling apart. Or, that a crazy lady was living inside my head. 

I was only unfurling into a new and unfamiliar way of being. 

I now realize there really is nowhere else to be but here. There’s no other timeline but now.  There was nothing for me to do but surrender, and allow life to rearrange me into new and better ways.

So headfirst and heart wide open, I jumped. I wandered and got lost.

I trusted the wandering. And the beauty and terror of it all.