A New Way of Deciding

I’m 36. I quit my job last month. I have no husband, no children, no advanced degree, no career track. At least not anymore. And sometimes when I come home to the embrace of my light and spacious apartment, littered with all the books and collages and comfy pillows and fresh fruit I love best, I am seized with an ancient panic. What if I have to lose all of this because I can’t pay the rent?  And I gasp like a scuba diver, realizing she is low on air and may not have enough to make it to the surface. I breathe shallow in that moment of scarcity, startled like a grazer in the open plain, fearful for its life.

Then I remind myself I can live in abundance for at least a year without worries, without cutting back, and a deeper voice thunders, “What’s the matter with you – that a perfectly good life just wasn’t good enough for you?! You are always demanding and ungrateful, and this time your foolishness, your arrogance, will be the death of you. You will bitterly regret this. Who do you think you are?!”

I pause. I take a deep breath up through my toes, swirl it around in the smoothness of the ancient bowl buried in my core that holds all the best of me and those who came before me, and reply.

“I was born into this world to laugh full-bellied, to feel the vibration of poetry and song in my bones, to speak my truth, to dream of better ways, and to celebrate and champion and love, deeply, all that is right and good and beautiful in this world. I am grief and confusion and longing. I am clarity and power and triumph.  And I love my spirit enough to shed what causes me to dim and doubt.  I am on a wild adventure in this time and place of darkness and upheaval, seeking my fortune among those who embrace awe, trust, harmony, and forgiveness, and they will only see me if I am shining brightly in my own way. Fear and shame – you are a part of me. But you don’t get to make decisions anymore.”

Then it is totally silent. The delicate scarf with the giant wings hung in my window drifts as the air moves in an out like the diaphragm of a whale breathing deeply with me tucked inside. There is space to root and reflect, and things click into place that make being here, in this way, right now so obvious, even though that voice of mine has every reason to think me impossible to please. I have been saying “no” a lot lately, but it’s all a conscious effort to realign the way I live my life.

It began back in March when I was offered a new job that seemed ideal, exactly when I was realizing how much I needed to leave the job I had. It would enable me to work with upper management to rebuild a volunteer program – just what I wanted to do. And it was for a small nonprofit supporting people living in isolation – just where I wanted to do it. The fact that the pay was higher than what I was currently making at a much larger organization was the cherry on top.  But I had been struggling since the beginning of the interview process.  I even tried to withdraw my application and was talked back into it by my interviewers and myself.  I was giving myself a pep talk about accepting the challenge and decided to ask the facilitator of a retreat I was on, Sarah Peyton, for some perspective. She asked me to imagine my new boss, my coworkers, and the people I would be serving standing around the room. She had me picture how far away they were standing and what direction they were facing relative to me. Those isolated people I would be performing outreach to were the furthest away from me, and the moment Sarah gently placed her hand on my shoulder to encourage me to step towards them, I began shaking, burst into tears, and cried out, “I don’t want to go over there! There are too many of them!  Maybe just one or two, but there are too many!” Sarah turned to me in her nurturing way and said, soothingly, “This is not the job for you.”

I faced a lot of disappointment and confusion over my decision; from the new boss and coworkers who were eager to have me join them, from my references who had seen what a great fit I was for the job, but most of all from myself. And all those feelings became a genuinely hopeless rage. What in the world did I want if I didn’t want to do that? What would I do now? And the only response I got was a subtle longing to stand next to giant mountains.

Since I had listened to that voice telling me “no”, I decided to listen to its strange longing, and took my first solo road trip to visit the Wallowa’s.  There, standing next to those mountains and pulling their timeless sacred silence up through the ground, I experienced my strength, a spark of mischievous adventure, and the sense that I would need to step away from everything that defined me professionally in order to hear deeper answers.

The moment of declining that job offer was a turning point for me my relationship with myself. I had decided to do plenty of things in my life that seemed irrational because I wanted to, but this was the first time I could remember not doing something that seemed perfectly logical just because my body told me not to. I simply wasn’t strong enough to over-ride its reaction anymore and I have discovered a beautiful gift in that. It is reminiscent of all the times I have gotten sick and realized, sitting on the couch with tea and softness and silence just how much I needed it and chuckled sadly at what my body had to do to get me to sit down. I decided to love it enough to listen sooner, even when what it said was inconvenient. I decided to admit that my mind doesn’t always have the best ideas and welcome my body’s intuition to the decision-making table. And just to make sure all the parts of me knew I was serious, to let it take over for a while.

This led to me quitting my job.  I could no longer deny the anxiety and constriction that sat in my gut whenever I was there or thought about it. No other answers or considerations were necessary. It led me to say “no thank you” to three men I went out with in the course of two weeks, just because my body didn’t feel comfortable being near them in a romantic way. No other justification was needed for them or myself. It led me to cancel a volunteer meal serving shift I thought I would love in favor of spending the whole day working on my blog, which makes me feel come alive. And just last night, it led me to stop a movie right in the middle because my spirit was asking for some inspiring reading.

What relationship do you have with the knowing in your body? Do you find that tuning into it makes decisions clearer or more confusing? What advice do you have for me and each other about how to navigate the endlessly complicated and tedious decisions we have to make without nearly enough information?

Nancy

“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” – unknown