At a book signing tonight in the splendid town of Agen (around 130km from Bordeaux) a woman in her late forties told me: “I want to change so much in my life, but simply can’t imagine doing so. I am stuck. And I know I am the only person who can get me unstuck. But I can’t bring myself to actually do it”. I told her that, from my experience, one of the problems with feeling trapped in a situation that you know is ‘hopeless’ is the fact that you also understand there is a ‘physician, heal thyself’ context here; that we all are, in the end, responsible for the scenario we create for ourselves. Of course, self-justification and the creation of a mountain of reasons to stay put is often part of the emotional calculus. And I never get judgmental of those who explain away their reasons to remain in an unhappy narrative. We are all - as I have noted many times here - the ultimate purveyors of our well-being. We can rail at circumstance, and the frequently toxic music of change... but we still have choices when it comes to how we interpret all that is tossed in front of us. I asked that woman reader tonight a simple question: ‘What do you want?’ She considered this for a moment, then gave me an exceedingly truthful reply: “If I knew that I might not be returning home tonight”. Was this a contradictory statement. Or a simple acknowledgment of a larger truth: we rarely know what we want. But maybe knowing what we no longer can support is progress... and signals the possibility of change,
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:42:18 +0000
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