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Reflection 10: Cocoon Time

8/25/2009 7:48:24 PM

Sometimes I think that life should be settled, at least part of it. Sometimes I get to the point where I’d take even one day of feeling settled, secure in what lies ahead, knowing exactly what I’m supposed to do and when to do it. Oh, how I love those straight roads that lead from point A to point B, clearly lit, no detours or surprises along the way.

I don’t care how many times it comes home to me, I still don’t get it: life is journey. I’ll grasp this and even celebrate it because it makes times of not knowing okay. Then I slip into the old way of seeing where I believe I should know what life holds for me, what I’m supposed to be doing—especially at age 60, for heaven’s sake—and make as few mistakes as possible.

Once again, just now, it came home to me: I am on a journey and right now, I’m at one of the places where I’m traveling in the dark. I can look back and see where my life has been and what I’ve given up (actually, released—but it still feels like loss) but I can’t yet look ahead to what will be. During these times I can be awfully hard on myself, believing that I should see clearly, should understand everything, and get to where I’m supposed to be in the shortest amount of time possible. Maybe that’s a hang-up from my truck driver father who didn’t know what it meant to meander and find meaning in it.

I’ve talked about cocoon times before (I think). This is why the butterfly image appeals to me. In this life, if we live it consciously and seek to know our purpose, we will experience times of darkness where we are cocooned: waiting to be transformed into a new stage of our life, changed by our experiences. Who we were before was not a mistake but a necessary part of the journey. I believe we evolve as we live: we continue to grow and become, to understand life differently simply because we’re older and we haven’t stopped reflecting.

Sometimes, in the darkness of the cocoon, I feel as though there’s something just beyond my seeing and I want to grasp it now, because it feels so foolish at this age not to know what the next stage of the journey will be. But I just made a decision to look at this time differently. That is, after all, what changes things: how we see them and understand them to be.

Isn’t it amazing and wonderful that life continues to evolve, to surprise us and teach us as long as we live? I’d started seeing my life as winding down, as fitting into a certain routine—meaningful perhaps, but settled. There remains within me, however, that little spark of yearning that refuses to go away, that part of me that instinctively knows journey isn’t just a metaphor for this life, but the actual reality of it.

I know there is more yet for me to experience, love and accomplish but perhaps the better way of saying it is this: I know that the more consciously I live, the more to life there will be; it will be deeper and more soul-satisfying as I learn to accept what is, rather than always trying to find what might be. I’m only sixty, and depending upon what life holds for me, I have many years to live and many things to learn, and most of all, many moments to be.

Journey blessings to all of you.