Starting Over

Are we really ever?

I can recount a number of times when I thought I was starting new. I was 17 years old and I had just turned 18. I was graduating from college and had accepted a summer job in Alaska. I was working part time in a health clinic, left work and got rear-ended in a car accident. Days later, I put my two weeks in and signed up for a course on connecting to my intuition with no other plans in place.

There is probably more, a handful of more accounts. And yet, the common feeling I have and continue to experience within all of these “new beginnings” is the weightlessness. I am in my body, and yet I am not. I remember seconds before I accepted my Alaskan internship, everything in my being screamed YES. Although what was this being exactly? Was it my twenty-one year old nervous system? Absolutely not. She was still very intertwined with my inner child’s jumpy and anxious thinking. So, what was it then?

I remember sitting at my laptop dazing off from the internship catalogue on the screen. Before, I knew anything about the benefits of breathwork, I recall a crisp cooling to my inhale breath. It was so cool that it reminded me of mountain air. Air that traced and concaved with monstrous high peaks so dark that a person may think it was because the clouds hid them from the sun. The feeling of these tall peaks were ones I had experienced before. Four years exactly, one summer in Switzerland.

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On sloped grass in the hills, I stood next to grazing cows. Little cottages and homesteads nestled beneath a forested land as I walked on a trail amongst a sea of my high school peers. We had all just graduated and this trip was a celebration (gifted to a large herd of us by our generous parents). In many ways, it served as a rite of passage between my youthful schooling years to the great career beyond. Or so I thought. At eighteen, I was still under the impression that following society’s next best step would get me what I want. What I wanted exactly? Purpose, credentials and passion. They all were defined as very similar things. Or so I thought.

During the majority of this trip, I partied with my friends and missed my boyfriend a lot. The insecurity within myself weighed immensely. Socially, I did not share anything too vulnerable with even my best friends. But to be compassionate, my self-awareness was a blank stare. I had no idea what was going on deep beneath my own surface. And yet, one night while I was on a beach with a very sad and drunk not-my-typical-friend-but-I-have-grown-up-with-you-friend I found myself sitting beside a resonate and weightless being of uncertainty.

Where is our life taking us? Why are we even here? Maybe here in this moment is drunk on a beach but also here is experiencing this and then going back to take a new step / the next step / a different step but is it all the same?

These were all things said and not spoken. In same, yet different words. For the first time, I found a grasp in this strange intangibility between the end and the beginning. I comforted the resonance that was mirrored beside me and unknowingly tasted the certainty in that this journey is the same. Different path, yes. Same result. The anchoring was strange, but I can still hear those ocean waves. It is hard to battle such soothing power when it speaks so gracefully on how easy it is to continue on and go.

There may have been a couple other intimate conversations that trip with this particular drunk and not-my-typical-friend-but-I-have-grown-up-with-you-friend. I have kindness for why he always had to be drunk, too. Many of my boyfriends’ friends hilariously made sure this new (yet grown) friendship did not include any scandalous intent! HA! Who could blame them though? The whole trip was full of so much flirtatious and explorative scandal. Oh, to be in an high school again...