Lost and Found

“When the way comes to an end, change. Having changed, pass through.” ~ I Ching

There is a Sufi tale about transformational change that tells of a stream that wandered happily through the countryside, flowing freely around rocks and through mountains. One day, however, it came to a desert. It tried to cross but when it ran into the sand, it disappeared. It tried many times, but all attempts failed. “Can this be the end?” the stream lamented. “Is there no way for me to continue?”

Then a voice came from the wind. “If you stay as you are, you cannot cross the sands. To go on, you must lose yourself to find yourself again.”

“But if I lose myself, the stream anguished, “I will disappear.”

“On the contrary,” said the voice. “If you lose yourself, will will become more than you ever dreamed possible.”

So the stream surrendered to the sun and the sand and evaporated into the heavens where it formed into clouds. The clouds were carried by the wind across the great desert. Then the stream poured from the clouds as cleansing rain, and formed a new stream that continued on its journey.

I’ve been feeling the stream’s pain lately, feeling like I’ve come to what I see very clearly as an end, yet having absolutely no idea where to go from here, how to proceed. Although everything in me and around me is telling me that it’s time to let go, time to move on, I have been utterly devoid of inspiration or, for that matter, motivation. For someone who likes the sense of security that plans provide, an ending without a vision of a beginning is truly terrible.

The fact is that I am at the point of selling my home of 23 years; it’s time, for many reasons. But I have no “next step,” not yet, at any rate. No idea where I will go, or live, or whether my daughter will be moving with me, or what I will do, or anything. But much like that voice in the wind that spoke wisdom to the panicking stream, an inner voice is telling me, “Let go. Become something more.”

Now, I’ve experienced many significant endings and beginnings in my life: leaving home; graduating from college; being widowed; becoming a mother; divorcing; sending my firstborn to college. Each one shifted my world. Each one changed me. Each one grew me. So you might think that having gone through such things, I’d greet this new ending with great equanimity, but if you’d think that, you would be very wrong. Because what one forgets about these flexion points is how very painful and scary they are.

I did not anticipate, at this relatively late stage in my life, for example, that this transition would poke at ancient wounds and trigger a terrifying existential sense of being pushed from a plane without a parachute. I did not quite expect that the old, negative beliefs born from trauma would still be heckling me from the shadows. I truly thought those things had been wrangled and put to pasture, but back they have wandered, breaking down fences and trampling my barely sprouting flowers of faith.

Life can be so exhausting.

But I recently recalled the Sufi tale, and saw myself in it. I saw how, like the stream, I have been metaphorically sitting at the edge of some vast, unfamiliar expanse, alternately holding back and then making tentative explorations into the vast unknown, feeling one day expansive and excited, and the next utterly stopped. I have felt completely lost in moments and had to remind myself that every time I have felt utterly lost, I have always eventually found myself again. It’s a process. A process that has its own divine timing.

In this process, I have developed a little more self compassion and a little more humility. I’d like to imagine that I’m getting wiser. And while I don’t have a full blown plan, I do know that, like the stream, surrender is the only way forward. I also know that I am getting on a plane to Italy this Spring, preferably business class — because life is short and because, really, I’ve earned it.

And if you’ve made it this far—which feels very long in this age of ADD— I’d like to end with a lovely toast, because all this feels like it calls for one. This was the favorite of my three-dot-journalism-hero, the late Herb Caan of the San Francisco Chronicle. I memorized it decades ago.

Here’s to the roses and lilies in bloom

You in my arms and I in your room;

a door that is locked,

a key that is lost

a bird, and a bottle, and a bed badly tossed

and a night that is 50 years long.