My strategic silence here for some weeks was, if not carefully planned, somewhat necessary while I drew inward and made some assessments in the quiet moments I had. Lately I have been pondering the benefits of staying in one place, versus moving away, towards new goals. Which is the harder thing to do?

Sometimes lingering too long in a location can bring on within me a sense of resentment, an impatience for change that simmers to a boil and threatens to cause all of my constructive efforts to be fruitless. If I have a channel for growth—a significant work at which to aim my intense energies—I find a sense of peace.

Picking up and moving is one way to create the opportunities I crave, and yet it is also too easy, in a sense. Looking back on my life, and at the turns in the road where I chose a less-beaten-down path, or so I thought; I wonder now if those weren’t just flights of fancy, and efforts to skirt the difficult task of staying put.

Fueling these thoughts, I immersed myself into Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy series, stories of a land she named Earthsea. In the first novel, the early life of a wizard is marked by his restlessness and yearning ego. While being schooled as a young mage, he chooses to show off for a young rival by using his significant power to perform a selfish and rather evil deed—opening a doorway between death and life, calling up some ancient soul to appear before them on a hilltop one dark night. The deed is accomplished, and the rival sufficiently upstaged, but the wizard’s own dark shadow also appears in that moment, a reflection of the darkest side of himself, from the other side of life. The shadow emerges from the doorway as a clawed beast, and rakes its razors across the wizard’s face; an older, wiser, stronger wizard sends it away and closes the doorway, only to die from the required effort, and the shadow is nonetheless released into the world.

The wizard must then come to grips with his act, at first avoiding the consequences of what he did, and then learning to face the fear of the thing, which roams the living world searching for him, clearly able to consume him if it wishes. He realizes that the only way to defeat it is to stop running, and turn around instead; to become the hunter and the one desiring a meeting. This intent alone somehow gives the wizard the upper hand, facing the shadow beast instead of turning his back to it in cowardice. By the end of the story, what brings resolution is not violent triumph but a rather anti-climactic, quiet acceptance: for the shadow is only the ego, the self, and the wizard alone had given it great power in the one act he performed on that dark hilltop.

Like the careless and fearful young wizard, I wonder if I am not sometimes moving from place to place, trying to escape myself, fearful of turning around to see what it is I am fleeing. Is something lurking behind me, some terrible entity that will swallow me up? There are periods of time where my greatest fear is that someone else will discover that anything good I appear to be is actually false. This fear has a long history.

But I do not travel alone: I have brought with me a family, children I am raising, and my attentions have for years been turned to them, and their needs. The fantasy is that I am solo, trekking off to great adventures and new tests and trials, but the reality is that I have simply been meeting the needs of those I serve for this time in my life, exchanging one sacrifice for another, bringing things full circle to the degree possible.

The less I am attached to my children physically, the more I can return to that place where I remember that I am an individual human being, and that fantasy of going off on my own feels closer on the horizon. At times it feels like it would be an evil deed in itself to walk off for a time as though I had none of these obligations, these several sacrifices to make in the interest of other people. At other times it seems the simplest, most beneficial act to perform—that act of tending to oneself after a long period of behaving as though the self had no needs. For the self has to be fed, and nourished. But not worshipped.

My own fear of being too selfish can come back to haunt me in the same ways I wish to avoid the trouble. Simply turning away from that fear doesn’t make it go away.

There are moments of attempted insight when I reflect on my childhood to see if there might be some glimmers of explanation for the struggle. Was there some evil act I performed for which I must repent, or which I must go back and face, and accept as being essentially the darkest side of myself? Was it some form of suffering I endured when I was too young to know the difference, when I was still capable of unwarranted trust? Both, it must be.

The riddle, or the balance, is that while successes are had in either achieving self-acceptance, or in discerning when trust is deserved, I seem to return to a place where the exact same lessons are relevant again, but at higher levels, and in more difficult and complicated ways. The impulse to turn tail and run is not yet routed out of me, causing me to wonder whether I’ve learned anything at all, which drains the confidence necessary to face the new challenge. Yet there are times when turning around is not a sign of cowardice, but a delineation between myself and a situation or person not to be trusted. A riddle indeed. The choice can be perplexing.

I try to spend equal time watching and learning while also moving and acting. I try to make sure an act has been well-thought-out, and that the act is decisive. This does not prevent me from questioning the act, or from making the opposite mistakes. I have been outwardly tender and passive—as a mother with children to raise—for too long to feel headstrong and capable all at once, or to understand adults very well anymore, if I ever did. Yet raising children has a way of fostering in a person those very simple and useful qualities, shedding the unnecessary, losing self so deeply in the process that something unexpectedly new and shiny is born that gradually emerges. This is a mysterious thing, not entirely clear to me, and parenting is not the only path to it.

What act will I take to make change with seemingly so much at stake—namely children, and a marriage? And yet nothing is at stake, we simply are, and whatever happens next is only the next bead on a string. Does one person’s act have that much influence?

Posted by Heather B on 21 October 2006 at 2:38 pm.