Paying It Forward

The beginning of 2019 I was in a significantly different place than I am now – emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

My ex-husband and I had decided to separate. I was living in a winter rental not in the town I had called home for almost 20 years. It was about 20 minutes away from my previous life but it felt like 1000 miles. I was both happy and sad to be there. Happy because it provided me an escape from the reality of my world at the time and sad because I had liked my life and I liked who I was in that life at one point. That life was slowlyg dying, which if you’ve ever been through a divorce, a death is the best way I can describe it. The person I had become felt equal to Alice of Alice In Wonderland tumbling down the rabbit hole. It felt as though my world was spinning out of control. I didn’t know which way was up and there was no end in sight. 

I stand by the idea of certain things, events and people come into your life at the right time and for the right reasons. 

The winter rental was furnished and adorned with positive affirmations and Buddhist paraphernalia that was not exactly up my alley at the time. But I started browsing the books on the shelf and reading the sayings on the wall. Outside of work, the gym and the grocery store, I really did not leave that house.

I started a daily meditation practice, journaled, read and did everything I possibly could to provide relief for that incredibly sad chapter in my life. Somehow, the people I needed appeared in my life and I leaned on them and I leaned on them hard – whether they realized it or not. To this day, I believe that house saved my life.

All of these factors certainly were not an overnight remedy and I’d be lying if I said some of those dark thoughts don’t still pop into my head every now and then. However, I am light years away from that deeply wounded person who felt hopeless and hanging by a thread. The person who every morning cringed when she woke up hoping it was all a bad dream and mentally begging whatever power that’s out there to just let me get through the day, let alone that chapter almost two years ago.

I took a lot away from that time in my life, none more so than feeling the need to help anyone who is in that position, knowing the deep feeling of sadness and pain.

While cleaning out some drawers recently, I stumbled upon a writing a friend gave to me back during that time. I read it every morning and it provided some much needed comfort. I have no doubt, some of you reading this have gone through some very trying times in your life or perhaps you’re going through something challenging now.

My hope is the following reading may help you as much as it helped me, as where I am now is where I wanted to be back then – two very long years ago.

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living: train yourself to it – but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.” – Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters To A Young Poet – 1903