“There are moments, often unexpected, when you find yourself at home in your own life. Simple, gentle, ordinary moments. Standing at the kitchen window. Rain outside. The earth springing into green and yellow. The birds, the ridiculous birds, singing without worry beneath the gray sky. For some reason, without effort, the anxiety lifts, your chest relaxes, your senses awaken, a quiet descends, and you are home.
It is in moments like this when I can feel how distant I have been from the life I long to live. I have been homesick and didn’t know it. I have been living miles away from my deepest yearnings and did not know it. I have been hurrying through my days isolated, fragmented, caught within the jet stream of the anxious world.”
In the paragraphs just quoted, author and motivational speaker Mark Yaconelli highlights the contrast between those fleeting moments when we feel that we are where we belong, and the stark reality of isolation, fragmentation, and anxiety, that is the state of our bodies, minds and hearts so much of the time. What are we to do about this alienation from ourselves? How can we learn from the “ridiculous birds” how to be at home with where we are and who we are?
What comes to mind as I ponder these questions is that there is no lasting way to achieve the idyllic state of being that Yaconelli describes. Yes, there is meditation, walking in nature, methods of breathing, mindfulness, and other spiritual practices we can undertake to counter “the jet stream of the anxious world.” But my experience is that I, and perhaps you if you’ve tried them, seem always to end up back where I/we started, back to hurrying through our days.
My current approach to this dilemma is to welcome those brief moments of joy and peace for the gifts they are, but to then let them go. We cannot, without being caught in its vortex, become less anxious by resisting anxiety. It may seem counterintuitive, but relaxing/accepting/embracing our discomfort may, like floating, enable us to rise to the surface of the troubled waters in which we are so often immersed.
This way of responding to the felt realization that we’re not at home is not giving up on “living the life I long to live,” but giving in to the sacred, benevolent force that holds and enfolds us, and that will bring us home if we entrust ourselves to it.
Attuned to Soul 