Should I stay or should I go?
I entered the meeting this morning quite unsettled. I think it had been prompted by an old school class photo taken when I was 8. It led me to Facebook message people I hadn’t seen or spoken to in 30 odd years. Perhaps it reminded me of how I was then and the changes that I have experienced since. Then I was quite a gentle, innocent and at times timid soul. Of course, the whole class has experienced changes, we are all quite different people now yet once we were kids together.
Within a short time, I was oscillating between being awake and in a half-sleep-like state. Oscillating is part of my hour of silence. I have been thinking there is a third state which is the other side of being awake and that is being attuned to the spirit or the higher part of ourselves.
The notion of leaving came into my mind and formed a word waterfall. Leaving is part of life though it seems we fear it. Leaving causes us to grow. Examples and images filled my mind from Adam and Eve being forced to leave the Garden of Eden, to the boy Samuel leaving his parents at the age of 7 to serve God in the temple. Christ himself left his apostles once he had equipped them and it was their time to grow.
You may be leaving a job, you may be leaving a relationship, you may be leaving the planet and you may be experiencing fear. The sense I got this morning was leaving is nothing to fear as it produces growth.
Even the United Kingdom leaving the European Union came to mind and in the spirit of my thoughts, even that did not seem such a bad thing. Curiously this afternoon I heard a politician say it may never happen. He may be right though the decision to leave will produce growth. It is only in leaving that you get a perspective that may lead to you returning.
The Prodigal son had to leave to find himself and in time his way home.
I read somewhere once that it is worth stopping doing something you do routinely to see whether you value it so much that you desire to return to it. If you don’t you don’t and if you do you realise how important it is to you.
I left the island of my birth almost 24 years ago and yet every day what I learnt there comes to me. Would I have realised how special a place and its people if I had remained perhaps that is the reason I had to go?
See you tomorrow, hopefully,
g.
