Written by Oh love,
Your life is in turmoil. When you look deep inside yourself, there is no peace to be found. It is a hurricane, a thunderstorm raging inside your gut and clashing inside your mind. There are so many uncertainties and unknowns. This causes stress and anxiety…massive amounts of it. What is life going to look like in six months? Shit, what is life going to look like in six days? Where are you going to be? What will you be doing?
There is no answer…you need to sit with that idea and accept it, Whit. It’s okay. Life will work out exactly as it needs to (hopefully).
There is one thing that you know for sure, though. Everything in your being, in your heart and in your soul, is telling you to slow down. Slow down and connect with life, with yourself, with nature. Connect with your body, heart, and mind. You have moved so fast your whole life. You have gone from one place to the next, one experience to the next, without fully being. Be present. Enjoy this moment.
This message is being pounded into you everyday, sometimes in the most gut-wrenching ways. Hitting the bicyclist was the most extreme example of this. Your heart literally stopped beating when he hit your car and in that moment, you were suspended. Your mind ricocheted from fear to worry to stress to guilt within a matter of seconds. It was the most present you have been in a long time.
It shouldn’t take hitting a bicyclist to become present in your own life. Let’s not repeat that mistake again (especially for all the bicyclists out there).
Yes, you know you need to slow down, Whit, but at the same time, there is a part of your nature that goes against this advice. A part of you wants to move to Europe or South America or somewhere else to experience the next big thing (and to run away from the current shit-show that is your life). You fear consistency, complacency, and stagnation. You always want to be moving and doing new things (I suppose having lived in 20 different houses by the time you are 16 will make this an ingrained lifelong habit).
What you fail to realise, Whit, is that you can have new experiences while staying in the same place. You don’t have to become complacent. You can enjoy the simplicities of life and experience the beauty and wonder of a connected, calm, humble existence. Ultimately, that’s what you need right now: to come back to yourself and be present with yourself. Who knows what you might learn!
You don’t have to conquer the world right now. It can wait; it will still be there in a few years. Process what has happened to you and honor the space between what has been and what will be. This is currently where you are: the in between. What has been is over, what will be is yet to come. This is your time to just be.
Whit Munroe 