Last Sunday, I made a pact that if we made it through the week without the worst coming to pass, I would prepare a proper Thanksgiving feast to honor all the forces that conspired to allow us to keep moving forward in our lives. Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in our home. I relished the hours spent preparing our meal, because each moment of that time felt like a prayer of gratitude for the gauntlet we had cleared. We pulled out all the stops - made each dish (including bread!) from scratch, cleared all stacks of mail and clutter from the kitchen table, even laid out our one and only tablecloth - an ill-fitting blue-and-white-checked, picnic-style cloth we used on our first date (a hike and picnic along North Georgia's lovely Panther Creek.)
I did not realize until we actually sat down to the meal that we needed to perform this ritual in order to actively shift our energy and our perspectives out of a place of stress, anxiety, and fear and into an orientation of gratitude and joy. As I shared with a friend today, my experience has been that, when travelling through the oppressive darkness of weighty unknowns, any tiny drop of light - any act of grace, kindness, tenderness, any incremental relief of pressure - feels like an encounter with a supernova. The minuscule becomes mighty. Nothing is taken for granted. Daily rituals like making coffee or brushing teeth, the home you inhabit (no matter how cluttered or imperfectly appointed), the ability to choose how to spend "free" portions of your time, the quiet smile of a co-worker, the simple joy of holding hands on the sofa -- these "basic" things become this swelling meta-thing that breaks your heart open and makes you want to hug your life close to your chest like a prodigal child.
Another realization this week really put me in touch with was that the people around you can be going through the fight of their lives...and you may not know it. We can make no assumptions about what our fellow humans are up against, and we ought not underestimate their battles. This past year has been a particularly excruciating lesson in hardship in my own life and in the lives of so many close to me. I am overwhelmed by the number of friends and family experiencing major deaths, bankruptcy, custody battles, financial struggles, terminal illnesses, unexpected total-life-upheavals...the list goes on and on. I feel so inadequate, often, in my ability to be present for my loved ones in meaningful, useful ways. What do you say to someone who just lost a parent? How do you offer practical assistance to someone in financial strife when you yourself hover right around the poverty level, with a mountain of debt breathing always over your shoulder? The thing that amazes me, and that I continue to learn so much from, is how each of these individuals faces their challenges day by day, including how they reach out for support and how they lean into and search for solutions. Sometimes finding a solution starts with making peace with not-knowing. Sometimes finding a solution means sacrificing something you'd rather do, in favor of something you kind of have to do to get through the season at hand. Sometimes the best solution any of us can muster is breaking down completely - utter, messy, undignified surrender as a means to clarity. The thing is, while we may carry around these master narratives we've concocted about "who we are" and "what we are meant to do" here on Earth, life is profoundly conditional. We become defined less by the slogans we tell ourselves about "who we are", than by how we respond to each circumstance as it arises in our lives.
All of which keeps bringing me back to an overarching realization that, for the past two years, has been slowly transforming my life, and, in effect, challenging my approach to it: I am coming to believe that the purpose of life is not to be extraordinary, to be THE BEST, to burn up every last drop of oil in your hurricane lamp...Rather, life seems to be conspiring to convince me that the real point of all of this, is to savor the fundamentals (the miraculous ground of being itself) throughout the ups and downs, and to strive to find a graceful balance between doing and being, in ways that fulfill you and are aligned with what you sense to be your purpose(s).
I still don't know what my Purpose-with-a-capital-P is, and in seasons like this it is all I can do to show up daily for life as it already is. But what I do know is that life continues to destabilize any premature grasp I dare to apply to my identity, to my sense of what I am meant to do or what kind of life I am meant to lead. Life just keeps throwing these curve balls my way, and the more I stretch and leap to catch them (rather than rant irately from left field about how that was not the pitch I was promised, or rather than stare obstinately in the direction of my expectations while missing the ball headed straight for me), the more I discover within me a capacity for agility, and for being surprised, opened, and transformed by lived experience. Best of all, perhaps, the more I allow experience to humble me, to challenge and to open me, the more connected I feel to others, who are also busy fielding their own curve balls and having their own master narratives shattered by The Great Trickster.
Life has somehow graced me with a tremendous number of extraordinary "teammates" - friends and family members with whom I am heartened to share the struggle, the mystery, and the miracle of it all. Even as these friends and family members field their own curve balls, they manage, somehow, to shower me?! with their love, support, guidance, and inspiration. And this leads to another revelation: the more broken-down and un-figured-out I become as I move through life, the more loved and befriended I find myself to be. It is as though life keeps stripping away things I thought were important, and things I brandished to feel anchored, identified, identifiable...and in its place, is left only my essence, which seems like this innate thing I am having to rediscover. Whereas before I sought to achieve and succeed in concrete, predetermined ways, thinking such achievements would make me worthy of love and respect, now that I am stripped bare of much of those external trappings, I feel more loved, more seen, more respected and supported than ever. Somewhere in the mystery of knowing and being known as our truest selves, I believe we come to serve as mirrors for each other, reflecting back to one another salient threads of our elusive Purposes. Perhaps just this is one of our greatest Purposes in and of itself: to be present to and for each other, and to hold a tender space for our realest, rawest, most stripped-bare selves.