No one knows where they are headed. I didn’t. Maybe, I still don’t. To look back, and to see some of the trail that brought me here, is painfully beautiful. This is especially true when one beholds a part of the trail, that one has never seen before or, that one had assumed was something else. There is a kind of dizziness, or vertigo, that befalls one when the landscape of fate reveals itself. As one’s story changes, so does one’s sense of self. Recollection, or a life review, is a big deal. Aging begs me to better know myself. And, that can be an existential thrill ride.
In the summer of 1986 I was 38 years old, I had just completed my MA. and was living by myself. There were so many ways my life might go, and I had very little idea which way was best suited for the being I intended to be. I knew that I lacked a center of gravity, a place within, from which I could decide where my life might go. The decision was made, I much later discovered, by an unknown part of myself, someone I can now see at 74.
That long ago me, started spontaneously to write. Little did I know that writing was going to be important to me. Instead, I just wondered about what I was doing, and went ahead and did it. Without any real intention, mainly to pass the lonely time, I wrote a piece, which I called at the time ‘The Initiating Wound.’ I’ll spare you the details, except to say, that that piece carried the elements I was to discover later in the aftermath of my stroke. All the seeds were present, I just could not recognize them yet.
Unknowingly, I wrote of a painfully important initiation, that involved being broken and wounded, to become whole. I wrote about how initiating hardship and loss can be. 20 years later I experienced it. I may have survived, because some part of me knew what was possible. Seeing it now, is poignant, disturbing, and enormously gratifying. I don’t believe my life, or anybody’s for that matter, is preordained. Still, this recollection gives me pause. I call it now, pre-traumatic growth. Somehow, some part of me knew the impossible. You can believe the world looks really different, when it veers off into the other-worldly.
When one can see crossroads that were traversed by an unknown self, it is sobering. It makes one wonder to what degree of reality one is actually perceiving. It’s a good thing ‘not knowing’ grows on you as you get older. I probably have never been what, and who, I thought I was. For me, one of the benefits of life review is that I get a clearer picture, that I am not what I supposed. The mirror of the past belongs in a funhouse, because it is revealing a me I know, and a me I don’t know. How astonishing!
The uniqueness of life review reveals to me that I am a holy mystery. Time has helped me ripen into a unique form that somehow was predicted long ago. I can’t figure that one out, but I sure can be swept into awe by it.
I hope that is your experience too.
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