“Expect Detours”

Heart-led adventures often seem to come after a significant change or loss, maybe a series of them, or a slow implosion of the old familiar ceasing to be meaningful or simply not working anymore. We may have researched and carefully planned these “trips” or we may have received a ticket with some vague and foreboding itinerary left at our front door like a bag of flaming dog shit.

Whatever else may be going on, when we are called on such an adventure, we are jugglers of many balls and those balls are beginning to fall out of formation like sugared-up first graders. We may have children, aging parents in need of care, and a career on our plates all at the same time. Maybe our kids are in that inevitably painful process of breaking away or they have already flown the coop and we are staring into that vast sky of mixed emotions that mark the proverbial Empty Nest. We may be facing the loss of possibility for things we once believed were inevitable – children, a long-term partnership or marriage, a particular career path.

We may have stepped off the path of serial monogamy and are standing alone on the tracks in a bereft and unfamiliar landscape. Or perhaps we’re seeking or just entering a relationship that is going to need a new set of love goggles because our old ones are the thick-lensed, cracked, held-together-by-tape glasses of our emotional intelligence from some earlier incarnation of who we are now or are aiming to be.  Perhaps we are experiencing emptiness and lack of direction and connection within what has hitherto been a stable and mutually satisfying relationship.

Our old job may have simply gone away for any number of reasons or we fled screaming, pulling out what was left of our hair. Or we have an itch to do something a little or a lot different that will not give us a moment of peace until we scratch it. We may be in a later chapter of life where we can no longer pretend that this particular story is going to go on and on forever.

And if we are even a little awake, we have an increasing awareness of the fragility and brevity of our lives and a concurrent escalating motivation to take nothing for granted, to savor, to learn to let go and to actualize, as if our life depended on it because we are beginning to see that it does.

Fellow sojourners, we are so not alone. And if we are fortunate, our physical journeys will go hand in hand with journeys of the heart and the spirit. Ones that will lead to more capacity for experiencing all of life – the whole messy, beautiful adventure.