Stumbling Into A Conversation About My Life

Okay so it is 11:24 AM...same day as the Mindfulness Post and my mood has shifted again. I am reading a New York Times article titled "How I was laid off - and learned to love life again: Losing It" by Dominique Browning. Her story is similar to mine as she also lost her job. And her journey during the ensuing months of unemployment speak to my own experience to date. Excerpts from her article:

• My addled brain interpreted the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation, that I had to lay in reserves.
• My nightmare had finally come true. For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills.
• Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It held up the floor of my moods, kept the facade intact. I always worried that if I didn't have work, I would sink into abject torpor.
• Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working.
• The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression. I felt like a failure.
• The demands of my job kept me distracted.
• With the closing of the magazine, my beloved family of colleagues was obliterated. And so the structure of my life.
• How had I managed to get this far in my life completely unprepared for the unknown-which I had always know was out there?
• After a few weeks of being unemployed, I began to settle into a routine - of getting up.
• I no longer had structured time....now everyday was Friday. Or Monday. Whatever.
• Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul.
• I would feel busy, and then, when I was in bed again, realize I had done nothing.
• The pace of my life had become so slow that I was struggling to keep up with it.
• In this way, being unemployed is a lot like being depressed. You know how there are millions (O.K., a handful) of things you swear you would do if you only had time? Now that I had all the time in the world-except for the hours during which I was looking for work-to read, to write, watch birds, travel, play minor-key nocturnes, have lunch with friends, train a dog, get a dog, learn how to cook...[and] I had absolutely no energy for any of it...just thinking about them exhausted me.
  
• I had absolutely ZERO experience in filling weeks-what if it became years?-with activity of my own choosing.
• Being unemployed meant being unoccupied, literally.
• It was strange and maddening to be forcibly retired.
  
• What took years to create was about to be undone in a matter of minutes.
  
• Weather-the actual experience of it, not the forecast-is one of the more dramatic discoveries to come with a slower pace of life.
• ...my brain flipped a switch, and I went from sleeping all the time to being utterly lost in sleeplessness.
• ...fear-over and over again, the response to change, even to the miraculous, is fear. I was fighting fear. And what was I so afraid of? Being alone with myself long enough to wonder what is the purpose of my life?
• ..the Psalms "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels."
• As I stop struggling so with fear and simply accept the slow tempo of my days, all those inner resources start kicking in-those soul-saving habits of playfulness, most of all: reading, thinking, listening, feeling my body move through the world, noticing the small beauty in every single day...these are moments of grace. Old Testament loving-kindness, the stuff of everyday life.
• I am growing into a new season...I begin to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of these days.
• I am not old and not young; not bethrothed and not alone; not broken and yet not quite whole; thinking back, looking forward. But present.
  
• I connect with something I may have once encountered as a teenager and then lost in the frantic skim through adulthood - the desire to nourish my soul. I do not have the temerity to think I have found God; I think instead that I have stumbled into a conversation that I pray will last the rest of my life.

I am not sure where this conversation of nourishing my soul will take me and the gremlin of fear is always present...but each day I commit to myself to choose growth and to manage my anxiety...