Creating big, tidal change in your life isn’t easy. It’s also incredibly easy, one might say, so long as you can stay committed to doing, being and thinking in ways foreign to what you currently know. Which is all to say that I do not ever want to give the impression that a move like the one I just made is somehow seamless, a steady loop of joy-love-ocean-frolicking-mountain-berry-foraging. No.
It looks like three suitcases exploded in my childhood bedroom with nowhere to put anything away. My brain on 24/7 overwhelm and exhaustion because I had to manage forty details a minute for the past three weeks to ensure my body, my possessions, my spirit, my mind, and my car made it safely out of LA—some of it on a plane, some of it into storage, some of it on a boat, and some of it into the ethers. It looks like me being triggered as people set in with questions I do not want to answer right now, so often I could cry: Why am I here? What will I do? Where will I live? Who will I be? Have I found the meaning of life? Explaining my work to people is often hard enough, but mixed in with the move? Oyyyy vey.
It looks like a profoundly tired body, a body that spent weeks hauling heavy boxes and pleading with USPS clerks to have mercy on my eleventh hour arrival with ten crates of books to label. Me reckoning with the total unknown of whatever comes next. Me getting triggered (yes, again) by the spiritual bypassing that so many of a certain ilk on Maui know how to do better than they know how to feel. It looks like me choosing to feel it all and breathing and accepting that I also chose this.
I chose this unknown, this new beginning, this reckoning with past and future selves, this new story. I am writing it. I am breathing. I am finding paths up the mountain behind my childhood home that I’ve never taken before, quite literally. But let me be clear: A move like this is certainly a privilege, but it is never easy. Change that we forge of our own accord—unlike the kind that life wields upon us when we least expect it—always takes time, is itchy, nauseating, scary, thrilling, awake. It demands, and gives us, everything.
