"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go."
-Tennessee Williams
I've never been one with a tendency to run away when things get tough. But perhaps that's simply because I've been privileged enough to not feel such pain or despair until my 27th year of life. Just this past summer I left the family I nannied for four and a half years. I knew it would be the hardest transition of my life. But when it actually came to it, and my ability to see them was no longer, I wanted to bolt.
In one way I did actually run. I went to New York for two weeks. It was too painful to be so close to them here in Sacramento, but not able to actually see them. When I came home from New York I remember this dark cloud settling back over me and my heart. The discomfort has only been magnified by the fact that I haven't yet found a job that really fulfills me, that allows me to feel a fire in my heart and a truth in my soul. My jobs since leaving the kids have been simply to make a living...far different from what I had in mind when leaving the comfort and security of nannying.
I find myself forgetting the reasons why I left nannying in the first place. My mind chooses to remember the sweet, tender moments with the chickens, and to forget the times I could so clearly hear my heart telling me I needed to move in another direction. And it wasn't to move on, or forward, or up...because raising kids and loving them, I think, is the greatest job I could have. But it's moving in another direction; one that I felt called to do and serve in.
It's been almost five months since I left working with the chickens. Going this long without seeing them, this long without finding a new niche, this long with anxiety and fear and the unknown...it has me wanting to run, to move, to shake things up. And while that seems exciting and adventurous, it also scares me to my core. My mind starts racing through the "what if" scenarios.
What if I decide to move out of my apartment, sell my car and most of my belongings, move across the United States to New York or some other city I love, and then I get an amazing job offer here in Sacramento?
What if I decide to leave and run, only to be given the opportunity to get back into the kids' lives?
What if I decide to move, and I do move, and then I fuck everything up and run through my money in a matter of months and have to move back home and ask my family for money?
A dear friend and mentor said to me shortly after I left the kids, "We grow when the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change." I've always loved butterflies, and I remembered learning about their lifecycle, and the need to become the chrysalis to change from caterpillar to butterfly. And though the transformation may take time and be painful, the result is such beauty and lightness.
My dear mother, knowing the general state of my heart, sent me this prayer recently:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability-and that may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually-let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time-that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will-will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that [Her] hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S. J.
xxo
