by Sharon Sorrell, MSLC, LSC*

                                                                                                                             The more I reach out
                                                                                                                           to find my way

                                                                                                                               Let the way open more
                                                                                                                          right here inside
                                                                                                                                                  --from the book Openings to Lighten the Way by John Sorrell**

I have spent the past few years enduring two major surgeries for a rare disease. It’s doubtful that I’ll ever fully recover. But this pain that won’t go away has given birth to a new feeling for how we can find joy in the struggle that is life.

Like many of us, I have always lived with the idea that there will come a day when everything in my life will come together, giving me peace and ease. My meditation will be perfect. My family will behave exactly the way I want them to. Everything at work will be supremely well organized, with no disconcerting surprises or mistakes.

Well, there is no “that day when.” That is not life. Life is what’s happening right now. Waking up with a headache, getting a phone call that your best friend’s marriage is breaking up, not being able to find the scissors for the millionth time because your daughter refuses to put them away (or to to pick up after herself at all, for that matter), your cat getting fleas, your health growing so bad that you have to change how you do things, even how your see yourself--these are all life. It’s also climbing into the car and finding a note stuck to your rearview mirror telling you that you are not alone--a note that same messy daughter has left for you to keep in sight as you drive off to work.

Life is surprise. It’s how every expectation can turn upside down in a flash. Life is how we struggle within those upside-downs, with those things that just happen, and in that struggle is the joy of discovering who we are.

 After trying to carry on as before my surgeries, I had to leave work, and won’t be able to do a lot of things that used to come easily. My physical strength and dexterity have always been my strong point--dancing, teaching dance, working in the garden. Now all that is gone, and it not only scares me, but leaves an empty gaping hole which was once full. But maybe I can let all this loss open up to a new self inside.

Far away, a friend of mine is in the hospital. The doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with her. She can’t eat and is down to ninety-nine pounds. She told me that one morning, when they again came at her with needles and tubes, she just couldn’t take any more. Her eyes blurred with tears. But then, as they put her through yet one more test, all of a sudden she just gave up. Gave up not to die but to be with the pain, the worry, the frustration, the fear of not knowing. Gave up just to let herself truly be in each moment of her sickness and see where it all will take her. This letting go surprised her with a new joy and peace.

The other day, a friend hugged me. In her embrace I felt like a weak, horrible failure and told her so, at last sighing, “I give up.” As those words reached back to my friend in the hospital, I felt my own tingle of surprise, my own flush of joy in this struggle that is life.

I don’t follow through with this discovery very well at times, and can still get stuck in feeling sorry for myself. But now whenever I get stuck I’m more aware. I can see myself more wholly. I can take life in a little more fully, letting it open up around me, inside me, feeling its living mystery more deeply.

The more we let go, the more we let in the wide open Spirit that abides in us all, giving ourselves that much more room to climb, to fall, to find our truest, deepest, most beautiful selves, and to see the beauty and blessing within even the most catastrophic happenings. Life is up and down. Life is peace and catastrophe. It is a jumble of things that don’t always go our way, but in the jumble is joy. In the jumble is God. The more we can learn from here, grow from here, the more the world may open up to us.

*Master Spirit Life Coach, Life Skills Coach
Member of the Certified Coaches Alliance

**Available by donation through Openings House