Yesterday marks 9 months since I lost my oldest son. Sometimes I think the only thing that has been pushing me forward is this looming house deadline. March 14th. We have to have everything done and ready to go by March 14th and we haven't broken ground on the actual house. We have a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the whole digging of trenches for our foundation. Hopefully we'll be digging within the next month because snow will be happening soon.
I digress. This post isn't about the house. It's about lessons I've learned over the last 9 months.
The first thing I learned was just how many sleeper friends I had. I'll be honest here, we're pretty hermity and both Mike and I are pretty introverted. I'm probably more of an extroverted introvert just because my entire "work" existence before all of this was customer service. So I've learned how to just deal with being around people. So I always felt as if I had a lot of acquaintances, but few people I would call a close friend simply because I tend to keep a lot of walls in place. This may be one of those things which has been shifting. A LOT of things have shifted for me in the last 9 months. So after all this, I realized that my friendship circle was a little wider than I previously thought it was.
In that same process of thought, I also realized (again) who my real friends are.
I am beginning to believe that traumatic events exist to remind us of our journey and also to clean out the clutter so to speak. It solidifies or dissolves those bonds which have been strained or have never really been established. It pushes us to change and grow. To examine our lives and to leave the behind those things and ideas which do us a disservice.
After my son passed, I poured myself into a lot of random crap. I started a whole bunch of new hobbies to busy my mind. I forced myself to go to many free local functions to meet the community and become a part of society. I took a psychic and self development class, and at some point I made it my goal to "know the unknown."
Unrealistic of course, but I think that class and declaration have made my journey more insightful, and has shaped my thinking more than anything else. One of the most recent class sessions was with a gentleman who is a self taught geology hobbyist. I know that's not a real term, but that's what I'm calling it. Our discussion with him was more eye opening for me on a personal level than anything else to this point. We talked a lot about tools in psychic sense and how you use tools to do your work, etc etc so I realized that I just needed to find the right tools for my life, to navigate. We all just need to find out what our tools are. Maybe it's meditation or yoga. Maybe it's that soccer league you do after work or on weekends. Maybe it's wrenching on cars or turning wood in the shop, but these are also tools for processing your life.
The other part of the discussion had a lot to do with judgement. We are all on a journey, and our journey is our own. When we judge everyone around us, we do them and ourselves a disservice. So before we judge someone else for not being in the same place as us, we should think about the times when we didn't remotely have our crap together and see how we could easily be making the same choices as the person we are judging. It was a wake up call to how judgemental I've been for awhile. It completely changed my views on everyone around me. A lot of anger that I'd been holding on to seemed pointless when I sat down and looked at it. Being out here has also given me the unique perspective of realizing how little so much of life actually matters. It is the journey, my friends.
Your journey is your own. We went to the Sanctuary Center in Sedalia this week with my class, and one of the exercises was to walk this path in the labyrinth. Mike had attended with me, and we were the last two in the labyrinth because I took my sweet time elsewhere. At one point, I looked over to him and was going to go take his hand and finish the walk out with him, but at that moment I had a realization that while we may be on the same path, we are each on our very own journey. So he walked his path and I walked mine. We were together, but also very much alone.
Your journey is your own. Your path may be shared with so many others, but your journey is your own.