When 2020 began, I kept joking that this year was all about clarity— get it, 20/20 vision? (Side note, I recently passed by where I got Lasik and noticed the building number was 2020…coincidence? I think not!)
At the time, I was imagining clarity as an outcome of one’s will, the product of consciously wading through choices, weighing things and actively making decisions. This is still a definite part of clarity, but what this year has taught me is that clarity is not just a product of internal movement but external as well. By that, I mean that clarity is also often achieved through surrender and acceptance to what cannot hold, what must break, the things that fall away as you release yourself to your own forward movement, growth, and change. In that way, clarity is much less something to achieve as much as it is a purification of your life and priorities that can occur naturally as you let life shake things up so much and steer you through channels so narrow that the barnacles of your life ship simply cannot stay on— they are scraped off and sucked away by the backwards jet stream that has been created in the wake of your propulsion.
So clarity then is about actively letting yourself be pulled forward by whatever attracts you while also accepting what is left behind in the process.
This lesson is a culmination of many years of mini and major lessons, especially around grief. I have had to process so much grief over the last several years, days where I cried for what seemed like ages, to the point where it frightened me that I was not actually anything but sadness underneath it all, that I was simply made of tears at my core.
I tried so hard to hold onto so many things. And this year caused me to accept to such a large degree that I cannot control the movement of things in my life, both outside and inside. The pandemic occurred, yes, and then I broke up my engagement and lost the illusion of a seemingly important friendship. While the pandemic occurred outside, the other movements occurred inside and like a current, swept through me and took me away to another place, depositing me on new lands.
But as I emerge from the waters, I am renewed. I am closer to what I want, clearer on the fact that I always knew these things couldn’t hold and reality simply pushed me to accept that earlier. There is a sadness there, though, in this whole sort of process, as if people and experiences are simply things around me that hold me in and I must break out of, like objects making up some intricate puzzle whose final shape is fit perfectly to my body so that I am perfectly confined by it. I think of those little balls that you would get for a quarter at the drugstore as a kid, the ones that broke up into pieces and you had to fit them together to make them into the shape of a ball— puzzle balls. Well, sometimes I feel I am in a puzzle reality, a puzzle existence.
Yet I don’t think that’s true. I think these parts of my life are not objects, they don’t fit just as much because they are alive and changing in their own way but when we both reach a point of real tension, that’s where there is a sense of real friction and rubbing, and instead of seeing it as something I have to break out of, what if it is that this friction creates the movement for us to both move forward into different directions? In that way, we both helped create clarity for each other, and we both gave each other the energy to move forward.
I suppose the sadness comes from the sensation, then, that there is some larger movement or force that we are a part of, how little in control we are of what happens to us as people as we continue to exist. Some wave could come along through us and sweep us off our feet completely, breaking up so many things that we never wanted to break, hurting so many people in ways we never wanted to hurt, yet the movement is the movement. We are in this dance, driven by an energy that we don’t control, and we are spinning, spinning, spinning— spinning away all the hands that grab us to make us stay, spinning away the threads that bind us, spinning away the dust settled, spinning into oblivion to the point where our hearts break open and flowers explode and blood splatters and you finally are set down on your feet as the wave moves past you and breaks on further shores. Or perhaps you find that you are the wave, crashing and crashing into others, waking them up, taken them further, and they, too, are waves, catching you and moving something inside of you.
My head is going into some outer space as I write this. So I want to ground it back down into the image, instead, of two rocks hitting against each other to create sparks. Catalysts for the flame. We will never know what we were to each other, honestly, but we can feel and know that we have effected each other, and always do have the ability to both effect others and be effected by others, and that even in the breaking away, the loss, there is real touching of each other’s souls, a marking that is deeper than you imagine.