Over the last few years, people have inevitably referred to my efforts to sing English church music and visit England as "adventures." Yet it has become clearer and clearer that it has actually been the time in between these moments -- over the course of a lifetime -- that have been the most adventuresome. One usually undertakes an adventure as a contrast to one's "normal life." In my case, I'd have to say that "normal"/aligned/at home with myself constitutes my year in the UK as a grad student in 1980-81, and then the multiple visits before and since then. Most of my journey in between has been an adventure in adapting to the strange, the unexpected and, at times, the "foreign" and confusing. Of course, a case could be made that I have learned more and grown faster in this offbeat journey than I ever could have had I stayed in the UK back in 1981, perhaps married and had boys who sang in a cathedral choir. And returning to England on these visits, I am by no means "returning" to the person I was in 1980. The country has changed and I have changed. It's great, actually.
I'm mulling over all this, though, because I can also see in the lives of friends that there's an interesting thing that happens when you stake a "claim" to personal growth, be it making spiritual progress, or developing a new career or degree, or moving on in whatever way shape or form, only to "return" to the old landscape. It becomes increasingly hard to adapt to the old place and people. Things (health, finances, general ease of movement) don't work properly. It's like walking through peanut butter quicksand while in a daze. The "flow" which you've lined up with and which is working so well in the more optimum environment is simply absent. Nothing is wrong with the old place or people, but you are simply no longer on the same wavelength. It's a drag, literally.
Not all of this is literal, of course. Sometimes it has to do with a new "place" physically, and sometimes it doesn't. In my case, I know that what is crucial right now is attention to the new direction, not the old one. And it's not so much staking a claim to a specific space, but, as mentioned last time, staking a claim to the feelings that I associate with that space: love, joy, fun, learning, abundance, and a feeling of home. Adventures can be exhilarating and fun, whether in the old landscape or the new. If they are not, that is when I am learning to look within and figure out "what part of me am I not keeping up with?" "Am I headed backward, and if so, why?" If there's something wrong with the picture, that's not a bad thing. It's good to have the warning signal, and not to spend years just living with it. At this kind of moment, any thread of love, joy, fun, learning, abundance, and a feeling of home will do -- just follow it. Today.
