When There is No Staying Safe
In times of high stress and change our natural inclination is to try and go back to being safe as quickly as possible, but often times it’s that very inclination to stay safe that gets us into crisis in the first place. I could go into a long thing about my personal philosophy on predestination vs personal choice, but the tl dr version is there are certain elements of our lives that have more gravity than other, and those high gravity elements involve lessons that evolve us for better or worse as souls. Until we accept the call to adventure, we’ll find ourselves repeating life experiences – like relationship patterns that continue despite different partners, or never being able to get or hold down even the easiest of day jobs.
When the shit hits the fan, generally it’s indicative that we have been obstinately ignoring the opportunities for growth we’ve been offered in favor of security and the known..
To use the 2016 election as an example, the Democratic party played safe – assuming they had a shoo in thanks to Hillary Clinton’s name recognition and middle of the road political tendencies. What they didn’t account for was the archetypal energy of Trump – as true a representative of a tyrant as you can get. The nation was receiving it’s call to evolve, and instead of embracing the clear necessity to take risks and meet that challenge; basically the democratic party opted to try to stave it off for another four years. We all know how that worked out for them.
On a more micro level, this has occurred in my life every time I’ve tried to shy away from music. When I treat my music as central to my abundance, I am rewarded with crazy opportunities and synchronicity. When I try to work a day job, slowly but surely, I begin to feel the drag of being off course. By the time I quit my official day job I was acutely depressed and suffering from inexplicably stomach cramps every day I was at the office, and that was still doing music as a hobby. Every major life crisis I’ve had was a result of trying to shirk by growth by taking a safer/shorter/more culturally acceptable route instead of trusting my intuition and leaning into the apparent danger.
Now, keep in mind: I’m not implying you should go sky diving in a windstorm or whatever the life choices equivalent to that would be. There is a difference between rising to a challenge and just being reckless. What I *am* saying is that it is tempting and human and societally encouraged to treat avoiding risk as the smart, healthy thing to do; when the reality is that the more you try to ignore those major life lessons the more intense and un-ignorable they are going to get. You get to crossroads where it’s grow or die (sometimens literally in the case of addiction, sometimes more metaphorically – as in settling for a loveless marriage or staying in a dead end job – your body survives, but something in you is lost). As something of a contemporary bard, it’s my job to help you find the courage to make the choice to grow.
As we enter this New Year and look back at the last, and the energy is around fresh starts and transformation, I hope you take a moment to asses the risks you’ve been avoiding, the calls to adventure you’ve been trying to postpone, and the longings which are your map to something beautiful, deep and real. Everything is up in the air right now – all of the truths we assumed would remain true throughout our lifetime have been called into question. The only way out of this period of intense re-imagination is through it. This is a time for dreamers and mythmakers to create a new identity centered in honest humility, grown out of processed grief and composted avoidance.
Your heart knows the way. Trust it.