Mary Oliver writes:
one day you finally knewFor me life is often like this. I suppose deep down I know the thing I'm supposed to do but it takes someone or something to hit me between the eyes so that changes are apparently sudden. Revelations come in a moment but they can change your life and your perceptions irreversibly. Nothing is the same again.
what you had to do, and began
But there's already been a lot of work in the background. At the time you perhaps don't see it, but looking back you can see the path you've walked. Or perhaps crawled on your hands and knees, feeling your way forward, looking for a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
Roger Housden comments:
The pain of loss, grief and despair is not essential for transformation. It is possible to step into a new life in more graceful ways. But for most of us, and certainly for me, pain and loss usually prepare the way. The moment itself may seem effortless, but a lifetime of suffering may have preceded it. A new life requires a death of some kind; otherwise it is nothing new, but rather a shuffling of the same deck. What we die to is an outworn way of being in the world. We experience ourselves differently. We are no longer who we thought we were. But I do not suggest for a moment that it is easy. Nor that there are any guarantees. If you start down a new road, you cannot know where it will take you.I never really seem to do things the easy way. I go through a period of struggle and difficulty, unbearable emotion, often pain, loss, grief, despair and suffering all rolled up together. It seems to be the way I learn. The hard way. But when your compass is so far away from true North, when it finally swings around again you really do know when you are back on course. And the elation of knowing that makes the hard times worth it.
All the same, when you are ready, you begin.
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life that you could save
