I wasn’t even looking to buy a house when John showed me a picture of a beautiful barn, for sale in a nearby town. Before I even saw it in person, I made the decision to buy it. And then, because I attached myself to that commitment, and because I thought that “trusting your instincts” means “whatever you feel first,” I performed a crazed-squirrel-evasion of the dump-truck load of warning signs that we should have stepped back and given the process more time to evolve. Once the urgency had my heart in a fist, I stopped feeling straight and overrode every concern with self-serving logic.
It was not a disastrous decision. We bought a beautiful home and had a wonderful experience, which certainly propelled us to a later, better, decision, but we paid too much, stayed too long, strained our inner and external resources, and I ended up with a life-threatening pathology that nearly killed me.
So, that is what we call the “hard” way.
Now, the “easy” way.
In Maine, we have a road atlas called “The Maine Gazetteer;” it has every little country lane and quiet cove mapped out. Living in the old farmhouse, trying to figure out how to make pennies into nickels, we would sit at the kitchen table with this book open in front of us to the same page and say, “Some day, we will live on the water, and we will live here.” We would drive up the coast looking at real estate we couldn’t afford, and pore over listings trying to shoehorn our meager resources into what we thought this fantasy was meant to look like. When, finally, we sold the old farm and needed a place to live, John inquired about a rental listing and found a perfect little house. It was in our budget (barely), and it fit, so we took it. Eleven years later, we bought it from the landlord in a private sale.
If you go to find the address on the map in our old Gazetteer, you will find it along the center crease of that coffee-stained page. Our back yard runs along the cove, in a place where you cannot see another house.
But it took fifteen years from the time we started studying that map to the moment we signed papers in a bank parking lot.
I used to believe that I had to be quick to be smart; that everything had to be immediately correct “from the gut” or I would look (and be) stupid. I thought to be professionally successful, I would have to ACT NOW or miss the moment, and, because I couldn’t do that, I was destined to fail. And it’s true that I wouldn’t make much of a professional comic or a used-car salesman; I don’t have that speed, and the pressure to pretend would destroy me. I was listening to everyone but myself, because I’d created so much noise banging pots and pans around my inner voice that my brain, which contains detailed instructables on how to get what I’d always gotten (and didn’t want anymore; that constant feeling of failing and being out of sync and confused and thwarted) was seizing the wheel before the navigator had declared a course.
When I look backwards at the good choices I have made, they were always made with a combination of the magnetic pull from my center, and the intercession of time. If I’m struck with a directive like a bolt of lightning, and that urgency is goading me, I know that is NOT the time to act. If I feel like I can’t walk away, I have to.
In order to realize this, I had to be honest with myself about my past decisions, and not paper them over with a story that I wanted to be true. Every decision has propelled you to this moment, and that has been your correct path because it has brought you here, but not every decision has been the easiest way forward. Some have been hard lessons. My first job was to figure out which were which.
In looking back at the major decisions of my life, I have come to realize that there was no Seven Point Plan precisely executed, no Cost/Benefit Analysis meticulously mapped. In fact, when I tried to spell out how I could make a dream a reality, and proudly laid it out before my parents for their approval and perhaps advice (this was as an ADULT, mind you), they, to put it gently, flipped their shit, told me I was going to go bankrupt and be a failure, and we had a huge fight.
After that I decided never to share that part of myself in that way again, and it’s been a long road to get here where I can say, out loud, “this is what I do and I am making the life of my dreams out of it, and the haters can stand down.” (Keep in mind that I can declare whatever preferences I wish to the universe, but I’m not in charge of the forms, only of the feeling which I choose to cultivate.)
In a way, they were right, though, because if I approach my life on anyone else’s terms, I will fail. I am not wired for the systematic plan.
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When, to reference my earlier post, I finally got tired of “manifesting” a career by smashing a loaf of Wonderbread with an unopened jar of peanut butter, I encountered a familiar feeling: the same exhaustion, born of attempting to muscle away terror, and the same imperative to abandon external and ego-driven authority or die on some stupid hill. The “Irresistible” in “Irresistible Invitation to Surrender” holds both connotations of the term: the draw is enticing, yes, but also inexorable. Fighting it can keep the way from opening into ease, but the only choices are hard, or easy.
So what has yielded success? What has put me in a place where, like the holder of a magic lamp in which the ol’ “I wish for infinite wishes ploy” actually worked, everything I really want (even if I didn’t know what that truly was!) spills forth as from a cartoon cornucopia?
It’s been that pull from the center of my chest, and the long pause. The waiting’s been the hardest part. But like the man says in the song, “You take it on faith, you take it to the heart.”
What’s YOUR process? And what are YOUR self-defeating instructables?
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Here I share my own healing journey, and I’d love to help you navigate yours. If you’d like to learn more about my Navigating Your Healing Journey 26 and 52 week programs of homeopathy-driven growth and self-discovery, and how you can follow these steps to gain greater access to your intuition and process, please click HERE for your FREE Embark on Healing call. Current and recent clients receive 10% off this transformational work. I am offering you the Irresistible Invitation to Surrender. Will you accept it?
As always we seem to be kindred or at least linked spirits, Sarah. When we were honing in on a 34 year quest to find the perfect home in FL the rush to a decision led us to put a contract on a house that required too many compromises. Having learned that walking away is always an option, we broke the contract & accented the penalty days before closing. Best earnest money lost ever. The real estate agents were aghast, but we were then free to work with a better agent and find our new home. There were still compromises, of course, but ones we accepted. It helped that when my kids were teenagers and tried to pressure me for immediate decisions my response was, "I want time to thinking about it, but if you need an answer now it is no." Works with salespeople, too.
I LOVE this post and your journey.