Tuesday night, I was again on the phone with my mom, watching our conversation turn once more to the philosophical. We were reviewing the seasons of our lives and their respective lessons and how all the dots connect, now. Reflecting on how from all the previously overwhelming uncertainty, we came to arrive here, where each of our journeys can be reasonably understood.
After we hung up, I thought about the seasons of my life where I made a big leap. The seasons where the big life lessons were taught. As I recalled those seasons, walking their trails in my old shoes, it occurred to me that I had no idea, then, how meaningful they were; I had no sense that a lesson was happening. I was operating under no illusions of growth. I was only surviving, just taking the next step.
Which, sounds a lot like right now. I have no idea what life lesson I’m learning. I’m surviving. I’m trying to take the next step into the darkness. And nevertheless, a lesson one day will likely come from this, if history holds.
How cool is that?
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But this week, I’ve been battling with the darkness. I’m tired of the learning and the dark and the prospect of future lessons. I want some light. I want to get where I’m going, despite not knowing where I’m going. I’m uncomfortable and I want some damn comfort.
Still, most of me knows better. I know where the shortcut leads. I know what comfort does. And I know that when these feelings arise, particularly impatience and self-sabotage, it means I’m getting closer to what I truly want: self-possession and growth.
In the past, when I’ve been in one of these uncomfortable stretches, stories have helped. I think we gravitate to stories that help us grow the character we don’t yet own. At least a dozen times during medical school, I read Way of the Peaceful Warrior. It helped me believe that one day I’d own my life. One day. During intern year, I started watching Game of Thrones. I needed to see horror and tragedy and make it to the other side, more whole, as some of the Starks did. As I gathered the necessary resolve to leave medicine, I read Greenlights. Matthew McConaughey’s commitment to authenticity was an indispensable model for the way I hoped to live. And over the last year, I’ve read The Razor’s Edge twice, where I get to walk with someone who had the same motivations I do, over a hundred years ago. It’s helped me accept it’s okay to want a life you love.
The gratitude I have for these stories is overwhelming. It’s hard to see myself sitting here, with my chance to learn some lessons, if I hadn’t identified with the plight of these characters. If I hadn’t ever watched Rounders. I needed every one of their words and actions.
Currently, I’m immersed in a reread of Wild by Cheryl Strayed. For reasons I cannot explain, her story nourishes me, leading me to something. As I open the book each morning, I’m walking alongside the company I need, even as she walks in the nineties on the Pacific Coast Trail.
One day, amidst a future season of storms, it’ll be clear as day what it was inside her book that was so nourishing. It’ll be clear what I needed. Just as another lesson will be understood and needed, from what I’m enduring now, only if I keep taking steps into darkness. And perhaps then, I may have earned a story of my own.
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(Photo Caption: And sometimes, you think you’re in the light but you’ve really been in the darkness for years, as I was here, on summer break in Maui between medical school years.)
