Choices

Rain is pouring down in the Bay Area this week and it makes me feel comforted but lonely all at the same time.  Opposition of thoughts.  I have a choice.  I can succumb to the feelings of being alone, of loss.  A quiet fear festering in the idea that I don't know with any certainty where my life will be in four weeks.  Or, I can embrace this feeling of envelopment that the Earth holds out to us on rainy days.  This feeling of, "I'm crying with you right now." The sky is crying-softly with relief.  Free and somber.  Tranquil.

It's been raining since Monday.  I went down to San Diego over the weekend and the weather was sunny and warm.  The weekend was framed in anxiety, emotion, unease but centered around feelings of 'home' and belonging.  All of these choices for how I'm going to feel, what I'm going to do, how I'm going to say what I'm going to say.  This is how February is being solidified inside of me.  In the last weeks I'm experiencing a profound shift.  I'll call it a growth spurt of the inner workings of how I react to the world.  It's progress but all the while, these shifts remind me how I hold on to past.  How I'm having trouble viewing each new situation as a new situation.

Sure.  We learn from our past.  We take the lessons we gain and we use them as a foundation for the next step in our journey.  The last years of my life have been defined by a feeling of being trapped though.  While we can learn we can also become jaded and resistant to trust and happiness in a sort of effort for self defense.  The last weeks have been the beginning of a shift.  I'm learning that I not only use what I've learned as information going into a new situation but I also prejudge the new situation almost completely on the internal narrative I've constructed based on that past information.  Instead of using it as a guide, as a "sometimes," it becomes an "always."  I'm closing off opportunities and projecting my insecurities.

February's mantra has become this:  Choice.  I have choices.  I am not trapped.  I have options.  Among other things, I acknowledge that I have the choice to trust, to love, to move on, to forgive, to leave, to be brave, to be vulnerable, to be fragile, to have needs.  I can choose to speak out, or to be quiet, to take opportunities, or let them pass.  And no matter what as long as I remember that I have a choice, I am free.