"Move in the direction of your healing."
I'm not sure if this is in the zeitgeist or if it's something that bubbled to my surface after the last 15 months, but it's written on my internal compass in block letters.
After a year and some months of seemingly endless complicated choices, I've given myself this primary directive: simplify your decisions and move in the direction of your healing.
I tend to get caught on this ride, maybe you know it, where I trick myself into believing there is a RIGHT DECISION and a WRONG DECISION. We could pontificate about where the false tension of this originated (I see you over there, Organized Religion) and how the lies of binary thinking have poisoned us (You too, Modern Politics), but that’s for another essay. What I know to be true underneath this noise is that there is almost never a right decision and a wrong decision. There is simply the life we desire and the decisions we make to create it.
There is a Robert Frost poem I return to often:
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
Simplifying my decisions first requires sitting in the middle. It means allowing the ambient noise of the world and the metallic clanging of my own internal pressure cooker to settle. The settling is often interrupted, but it is the starting place for my listening to what is true, what is healing, what is meant for now.
What is most true in this moment is this: I want to be exactly where I am and I need to make art. There are worlds in me that need permission and time to burst onto pages. I’m finding my voice and writing the kinds of things I’ve always loved consuming but never dared create myself. I want to be audacious enough to opt out of the hustle I imagined for myself and explore the wilderness of imagination. This is where the healing is. This is where vitality will be re-membered.
So I’ve thrown out the Very Serious Plan for graduate school and given my Self explicit permission to play, explore, create. I let go of the story I had written about what it would mean about me if I changed my mind. Minds are meant for changing. Simplifying my decisions and moving in the direction of my healing meant eliminating the options that did not serve my deep need to explore and create in the way I know I need to right now. It meant remembering there is no secret right path or misleading wrong path, simply the life I desire and the path I choose.
I choose wild.