"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke
In each of us there is a battle between good and evil. And I don't mean in the religious demons vs. angels or god vs. the devil sensationalist sense. I mean, in the decisions we make in our everyday lives that collectively make us the people we want to become. Most of us never think that deeply about who we are or how our thoughts create the people we will evolve into. A lot of us are just surviving the day to day until those trying situations in our lives commands us to confront ourselves.
I have taken a job teaching kids how to dance, ironically at the school where I grew up. And, despite the chitter chatter of judgmental voices like wicked stepmothers spinning threads of criticism into my head, I am awestruck when in the midst of my disciplining and coaching, I have a breakthrough with one of my kids. When I get through to one of the troubled ones, we'll call her Big Al, and all of a sudden she is the first one getting the choreography, telling the other kids to put a sock in it as she shamelessly shakes her head at their misbehavior and is excited to show me choreography of her own.
Or when my little ones, the five year olds, run and hug me, look up with their big eyes and say, "Ms. Natalie, I love you." Or, "we had an amazing time," or "you're awesome". When they ramble on and on about their lives- in that moment I feel my whole life has purpose. I feel a joy I haven't felt with anything else.
Let me balance the good by saying there is so much going on in my personal life that some days, I want to walk down the 210 going the opposite way of traffic. Perhaps, that is a bit dramatic but my little life is constantly brimming with crazy aunts coming over my apartment threatening to kick me out, racked up bills, crises of every sort from family, to police, perverts, peeping toms, incarceration, horrible bosses, co-workers I can't stand, and I now I am beginning to think I was some kind of merciless serial killer in my past life.
I am brave enough to say I don't know what the hell I'm doing, I don't know where I'm going. I have a plethora of great potential according to those around me and not one clear road in sight. I seem to be finding my way in a world I never really did fit into.
But then again, I think about my kids, what I want to do with my life despite the fact that the picture isn't there yet. I think about the moments I want to leave behind and the amazing impact those few special teachers had on me growing up and how I feel it is a call of duty to do the same for these kids. I'm coming to realize that life isn't about figuring things out, but about letting go and letting the answers reveal themselves. I cannot control the path’s direction and what happens if I take one road versus the other, but that I should just live anyway, trust in myself to make the right decisions and learn to let life run its course.
This is the lotus flower we must find in the murky water of our lives; the human spirit that thrives in each of us. There is no shame in having to start over or to reevaluate a new path because the map you had for yourself did not lead you to the destination you were seeking. The point is to accept who you are no matter how the world sees you and even though the world hasn’t validated you yet.
Sometimes, your decisions despite hard work temporarily leaves you on a road bump that challenges you to continue, to muster the strength to keep going. But that is the challenge. To be the good in the world when no one is a witness. To learn to love even when you have been hurt before and every pore in your body wants to hold you back from another hazardous experience. To take risks and to keep going no matter what. To be afraid, terrified of humiliation but to try again anyway. For me, that means dusting the dirt off past failures, putting on my four inch bad ass stilettos and fervently breaking through the surface to rise and dance again.
