Last week, I started crying in despair shortly after waking up. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to call on a lesson I learned back when I was studying kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism:
Discomfort is light—new awareness—trying to be revealed.
“What is this feeling trying to help me see?” I pleaded out loud.
I waited in silence for something to occur to me, but nothing did in what felt like a long time. So I got up and went about my day. Then, in the shower, it hit me:
I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t want my life to be other than it was.
“Wow!” was the only word I had for that revelation. And I call it a revelation because it fundamentally shifted something inside of me.
How do I know that?
For one, I could feel it. Also, I observed it free of any emotional charge, even as my mind was aware that the realization could have sent me spiraling into self-judgement, grief or regret.
Before this revelation, my greatest fear was dying with “my music”—or “the work I was born to do”—still inside me.
It was a fear that grew and grew from a seed that I planted when I was about ten. That was when I started getting a persistent sense that I was born to do something great. So great that it would be worthy of landing me on the cover of TIME magazine.
The short version of what happened next is that my pursuit of greatness—which was really a pursuit to feel loved and recognized for doing something useful—put me in a state of chronic low-level angst and dissatisfaction for decades.
My late brother, a pastoral counselor, could see that I was struggling and introduced me to kabbalah, which opened me up to all sorts of spiritual ideas.
Eventually, I came to see that “the work I was born to do” was to remember, express and evolve who I truly am—a spark of God / a divine soul / love in all its forms—not to seek love by being productive.
Paradoxically, we can become quite productive in the prevailing sense by expressing the various shades of love we are, but that’s icing on the cake, not the goal.
And while I’m on the topic, I’d like to offer a 2.0 definition of extraordinary productivity:
Modeling kindness to oneself, others, the earth and her creatures.
This definition happens to set up children who’ve not yet learned to restrain or chastise themselves, and elders who’ve learned better, to be the most productive of us all.
Still, even kind and divine beings have bills while living on this planet, and I was on a quest to support myself doing something that lit me up.
Finally, after many moons on an arduous road, I got the inspiration to help neighbors grow villages, or to create caring and supportive communities together.
And the clouds parted, and angels sang.
But after a year of developing my ideas—embedded within seven years of living with my parents, then mother, as a caregiver—I was languishing in limbo land:
My search for soul work was behind me, but a path allowing me to return home, be reunited with my man and really dig into my work hadn’t appeared.
I felt sorry for myself about this despite definite benefits to being exactly where I was, and knowing that sulking was only working against me:
I was resisting my circumstances and what we resist persists.
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