There is a lot to re-entry. It is more of a process than event. To some, it might seem that I am making too much of a simple return to normal life after a vacation. But I didn’t just vacation, I unplugged. I left my regular life behind, my job, my house, my pets, my friends, social life and I was just with me. I was with my parents and kids too but I got to spend a lot of time with myself. And it was this time I spent alone with myself that has caused the re-entry to be kind of an ordeal.
I didn’t go to Africa. Or some other exotic locale. Where I am forever changed because of the dramatic change in scenery, climate, culture and experience. I came back changed because of how much shifted in my internal landscape. And it is this internal rearrangement that has made it hard for me to go back to how I lived my life before.
I am back on my familiar shores but I find myself not wanting to do it the way I did it before. I am finding new motivation to change my life up, with me at the center, which I am not sure that I have ever really done before. I tend to be other led. Work dictates, the kids dictate, the social life dictates and I follow. I obey. I go along.
But something happened to me out there on the lonely desolate shores of Irish Beach...I somehow drove miles from my usual center, and I caught up with myself. I sat with myself and found a place inside me, formally unoccupied, that was always too hostile an environment, or too cold, or too something for me to agree to occupy that space...but this time, the place that I have always seemed to fear to tread became a sanctuary. A solace from the world. And while it may seem hard to believe, I am not sure I have ever more than occasionally visited this place inside me before, well, at least not with any ability to stay. What I seemed to lack was a willingness to clear it out, and also an ability to stay, to remain. If there is one thing I have done consistently in my life, it is leave. Leave you, leave me. The result is always the same. I am never where I am for long, even when the only place I have ever really needed to be is right where I am.
So I have retuned to my own shore. Again. But this time, I really feel no compulsion to leave. I am just pretty content walking my own shorelines, venturing deeper into the more lush landscape when I feel like it. I have been through the afterburn, I have been through the chute deployment and the splash down. And here I am, right back where I started from. Except it isn’t. I find myself standing on the shore of myself and realize that there is so much I don’t and didn’t see. So much that I didn’t realize. So much that I missed. And perhaps for the first time ever, I am ok, right here, right now, alone.
Sometimes you have to leave yourself for a very long time to even notice you are gone. Sometimes it takes decades. Sometimes it just takes a week long trip to a place that called to you to find a new road home to the shores of yourself.
