Joy is a journey
The following email was written to a client in response to her own continuing journey of seeking to live a life of joy, even when shit is hitting the fan. Like so many women, I believe she has been in that search for a very long time with the always-looming question, “If my life is so good, then why am I feeling so empty? If I have everything I need, then I have no right to feel the way I do. I lack for nothing, yet something is missing.” OR, my favourite, “my time is running out; I have to get on with it!”
The internal conflict, while it remains unexpressed, feels very real. But, to bring it into the light, expressed publicly - is not often the thing we want to talk about. Is Joy really too much to ask for, to expect?
Well, you would think so, given the constraints we have applied to our lives, like family expectations that flub personal boundaries even when they have been otherwise clearly expressed. As women, we have learned to power-through these expectations by capitulating to the needs of others first. Our programming ensures that we be kind to others at any cost, in forfeit of our own deep self-respect. We have learned well the art of self-betrayal.
Women have learned to wait, to self-sacrifice. And since there will “always be a future to wait for”, women continue to hold back on themselves. We keep avoiding, denying, and defending that we don’t have the power we actually have. Our choices always have consequences. For women, I firmly believe that it has everything to do with owning, and voicing, our deep wisdom. We avoid the fear of the shame that has been perpetuated through the application of ridicule and being mocked, denied and disrespected. It is now time to stand tall, take a breath, and let our deep wisdom be heard.
My client is exhausted in seeking to ‘figure out her life’. She is a professional, a wife and a mother. She knows the ‘rules’ of the game… and she also knows that they are not working. So, after years and years of trying to figure out her life, she has decided to change her context for living from ‘normal’ (meaning fix what is broken to keep it squarely on the rails of holding things together) to instead LIVING LIFE in the fullness of its blatant uncertainty. Choosing this, instead of what she has always known, has invited her to reconsider her emerging identity as a force in a world of her own creation. Her path to that reclamation is the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge: Working Environments as Living Systems.
Here are my words to her;
As far as when you’ll arrive at the moment that you grok the I AM that you already are, I have no clue. All I can say is that in your relentless pursuit of a meaningful life, it is already happening. It took me a while… and I know that it does not have to. One day, you’ll just know… and you won’t know, necessarily, when you actually knew.
For me, I was willing to relentlessly stay with the journey, ’cause it was the only way of being that made any sense to me. I had become so tired of being handed a shovel to dig myself out of my conflicts, only to find myself digging myself further in. Not fun.
I learned that you can teach an old dog new tricks. I needed to become my own bitch on my own behalf. Turns out that owning my inner bitch has welcomed me through and beyond the door of my own salvation. A very good thing!
I say this to you now, as I have spent the past weekend in the good company of 40 nurses at the 55th reunion of our graduation. That was on Saturday. On Friday evening, about 250 of us from as far back as 1954 (70 years graduated) met for an Alumni dinner. The youngest in the room were 50 years graduated. Knowing what I now know, it was an honour for me to be in that room with 250 women who - of this I have no doubt - have lived lives which have contributed significantly to others
It was a most intimate experience for me… perhaps more so now, because I am in my 79th year, and I know that my time here on planet earth is shortening. I looked at the 90+ year-old nurse who was so thrilled to be at the event, smiles galore. I also observed the one in my class who was kindly supervised by her close friends; she has started into dementia. She was there, yet she was not. So many have passed on, so many did not show up for a variety of reasons.
I know that I have expressed a lot of words here to encourage you - even if by innuendo - to keep on trusting yourself as you make decisions for your own life. My experience of this past weekend has brought the importance of that home in me, loud and clear, if ever I felt the need to remember. Louise LeBrun (Founder of WEL-Systems®) reminded me so many times, that choosing for mySelf would be my greatest contribution to the well being of others. (I hold that statement as worth underlining for emphasis!) I am glad that I took heed of what she shared with me. You have a long life yet to live… and on your own terms, you will come to realize the joy I believe that you are seeking which is, in fact, all around you.
It is not just about what I could call time remaining; it is about way more than that. I think that the quality of life which we create for ourselves is more about volume, about taking up the full space which provides personal momentum forward - the space that each one of us is - to live fully, whether it happens to be 20 more hours or 20 more years. I think in this way now, not in maudlin terms, but in the great joy of having reclaimed the possibility that has always been in search of me to express. It has taken constantly letting go, even when I relished the feeling of resistance, thinking that would make me ‘right’, because I was doing the ‘right’ thing. However, when I did ‘right’ only for others and not for myself, ‘right’ just took on a bigger sting… for everyone, me included.
So, I stand with you. I know that you cannot get ‘it’ wrong. I also know that none of us will ever get ‘it’ done.
When we change our perspective about who and what we are as spiritual beings expressing though tissue into a physical reality, we find the ease and the joy to change and sustain our lives.
Thanks for reading.
Sheila