Monday was one of those days, the kind of day where my schedule gets turned upside down and inside out and there is really no solution but to go with the flow. Come to think of it, that seems to be the pattern of my Mondays lately, but it seems to take me a little time to recognize new patterns and adjust. I don’t mind change or flexibility, but my brain patterns are often a little slow on the pick-up and for the last 10 days or so I have felt a little slower than usual.
The weekend before last, I was on the team for an Episcopal Cursillo. I had been a candidate a year ago, and was honored and excited to be on the team. I didn’t really plan on taking a blog break however, mostly because I had just taken one six weeks before, and I can't seem to manage to fit my life into a consistent pattern. I have struggled with this, struggled with my own tendency to need and seek structure, a tendency which often clashes with my increasing rather profound comfort with the unknown, my interest in putting people and the soft squishy things that connect us first in life. Perhaps this is where I need to be now. Perhaps I need to simply accept this struggle that I see within myself, the constant back and forth, and accept that my own internal struggle is in some sense a mirror of the struggle I see in the world.
There is a lot of information online about Cursillo, in fact pretty much everything about it is available online in this marvelous world of Google and internet transparency. And I’m a big fan of transparency and opposed to secrets that tend to exclude: secret societies, hidden handshakes, and all the carefully guarded and hidden things that we humans use to separate “us” from "them". But here's the thing, all that stuff that we do on a Cursillo, all the materials, all the structures, everything, is just a framework, an underlying skeleton if you will. These things shape the layout of the weekend, but they aren't the experience. The experience itself is much more squishy because it depends on people, on the interactions of people, people working together with faith and hope and love, and because people are always different, and their interactions and experiences are in fact not structured and predictable. The experience of Cursillo is something unpredictable, and very often quite wonderful. It is in fact, something greater than the weekend itself. Cursillo is not a weekend. The weekend is merely a door which one is invited to open.
My experience of one year ago was entirely different than my experience this year, and this difference was not entirely due to the fact that first I was a candidate and now I was on team, although that did contribute. I was different and I needed different experiences, I reacted in different ways. Although the underlying structure was the same, the flow of the weekend, the people involved and they way they interacted were also different. But the thing is, even if we tried to duplicate the exact same weekend, with the exact same people, it could never be the same, because we are never the same.
Last year, I was still pulling myself together following George's death 17 months previously. I had been through a year of emotional turmoil, a year where, trying to pull myself out of a profound sense of isolation, I said yes to everything that passed my way until I realized that I needed to slow down. I had been through a year of emotional instability, where I felt like my rational and deliberate side had been drowned in a tsunami of emotion and circularity, and I felt I was more likely to get sucked down some giant drain into the void than I was to climb out and regain any kind of consistent hold on life.
A year ago, attending Cursillo forced me to pull inward, forced me to look at that messy, emotional, touchy-feely, embrace-the-unknown, part of myself, and accept her as completely valid and necessary for my continued existence. I realized that the tsunami unleashed by George's death, was in fact a huge part of my true nature that I had suppressed for many years, since childhood really. Somewhere along the line I had been brought up to believe that emotion was bad (and I had an excess of it), and that the creative, needs-to-write-everything-down-in-order-to-understand, meditative and philosophical parts of myself were not acceptable either. I had emphasized the organizational, intellectual, structure-oriented, project-oriented, planning part of myself to the exclusion of the other parts. And I had been fairly successful with that.
Until I wasn't. And all that other stuff came pouring out and I tried desperately to slam the door on it and shove it back into the void. But instead, the walls came tumbling down.
A year ago, I finally began to accept that it was ok to indulge my introverted self, that being introverted wasn't shameful, that it was fully acceptable to pull back when I needed to pull back. I finally accepted that I needed to write; that I needed to explore the more creative aspects of my personality, and that only if I gave myself permission to be fully myself, not the self I thought the world wanted to see, could I find peace. That weekend was an open door. And I stepped through.
But accepting what I needed to do and where I needed to go was not as easy as I might have thought. I still struggled. In fact it took me most of the past year to figure out how to balance my needs for space and thoughtful reflective time, with my need for being busy and being involved. It took me a long time to accept that it was acceptable to say to myself, "no, I need to take time to write", even though my writing may not be good, even though I am not pursuing worldly success as a writer. I write because I must, because it is who I am, but giving myself permission to own my writing took a little more time.
Now, a year later, I write most days, even if my writing is merely the process of keeping a journal. But I have written a few things of which I am very proud, and some of them have not been for this blog. And the process of writing has helped me with the process of thinking, of knowing who I am and what is important to me. It has helped me with the process of speaking and even of acting in the world. Writing has helped me with my own sense of presence and space. And because I see the need to write, I see the need for personal time, not just for writing time, but for daydreaming time. And I need to withdraw less, because I honor the time to myself more. Oddly enough giving myself permission to need private time, has made my public time more effective, and made me a better planner and manager because I am no longer building walls.
A year ago at Cursillo I was overwhelmed and needed to pull away from the experience, to internalize it, and it took me a long time to recover from the experience. This year I managed to be fully engaged in four full days of pretty much being constantly "on" without coming home and slamming my door on the world. Yes I took a personal day. In fact I took two. But that was partly because I came back to a crazy schedule and a crazy world, but it was a world in which I was fully engaged and fully invested.
What I have learned is that by honoring all of the conflicting parts of who I am, I can actually be better, and more engaged. I can be invigorated and inspired by contact with others and the flow of ideas without needing to withdraw completely and seal myself into a little safety bubble. It is possible for the social me and the introverted me to coexist harmoniously, hand in hand. Allowing myself to honor my inner creativity has actually allowed me to do more and to withdraw less.
Another door has opened. No bridges have been burned. What new world awaits?