Revising the Status Quo

In recent weeks, I'm going through a tremendous period of self-discovery and exploration. While not necessarily on purpose, it's been re-organizing the perspective I've had, both for myself and for others.

I moved away from Ketchikan, Alaska, into what I was (and still am, although differently) perceiving as a crisis of sorts. The details of said crisis need not be publicly discussed, but the effects it's had on me, I don't mind sharing. I panicked for a number of reasons, got on the first plane I could, left the BW3 there, and just came back to Colorado.

I got off the plane in Denver, and I found myself stepping into a world nearly as strange to me as the world I met when I first landed in Ketchikan. Compared to my last few months, Colorado brought with it epic expanses of sky, miles of mountains and sunsets behind them that could make one all but weep out of joy. The city of Denver offers a plethora of food and culture, nice and friendly people, albeit many, many of them. The temperature is between 30 and 40 degrees hotter here during the day, and that has left me too sweaty, too often.

The feelings, though, were more complex than I've felt in a long time. They shook me to my core. I've felt so lost for so long, drifting from place to place in my mind, not really being present for just over four years. I've felt like a shell. Hollow. Empty. Comfortable in the fact that for me, someday, this will end as easily as it started. (Apply that last statement how you will; it has many layers.) But when I left Ketchikan, I felt genuine sadness, anxiety, anticipation, and excitement. While these emotions seemed hidden in a cloud, as though I were feeling them after staying awake for two or three days in a row, they were still there, and I was grateful.

I've found, however, that expectations can be as damning as they can be productive. I had expected to come home and see everyone and everything in a certain light, a certain way, to do my certain part, and to be treated in a certain fashion. From the moment I stepped off the airplane, all of that got turned upside down. Nothing was as it seemed.

Now I'm sitting here. It's been two weeks. My ideas, my goals, my "realities" as I knew them, as I built them, are inverted, and the moral compass that has been roughly guiding me has been spinning out of control, not showing me direction in the fog that shrouds the life I will experience from here.

I suppose the best thing to do at this point would be to take one careful step at a time, taking care not to step on anything or off of anything that could devastate my reality any more than it has wound up changing on its own. I can meditate and journal to remind my mind to be at peace with these things, and act gently and thoughtfully, remembering my recent post about the mantra "May everything be exactly as it is." I guess I should remind myself of that when I feel so lost, remind myself that I'm only lost if I stop looking, and that until that point, I'm still seeking the answers.

It's not easy to revise your status quo.