Slouching Towards Change

I am ever so slowly pushing myself towards the precipice of change.

This is a thing that I am doing with some trepidation - after all, change can often go precisely the way you don't want it to - but with a hesitant sense of purpose.  I sense - and it has been suggested to me - that my ability to make the significant change I need to move to "the next level"- whatever that really means - is limited without some additional prodding.

How do I feel about this attempt to force change at a faster rate than I would undertake myself?  Excited and scared at the same time.  Excited, of course, because what I have tried to this point has not been the raging success that I have hoped for.  If I look over the last four years of my life I can see change, but it seems like tangential change:  change in activities which only indirectly result in a personal change.

Scared because, of course, once you open the can of change all sorts of things crawl out of it:  things that you hoped to resolve and all kinds of things that you either were not planning to deal with at all or perhaps worse, that you did not really intend to open up to the process at all.  One thing can lead to another and suddenly you discover yourself remembering and having to deal with an issue that is twenty years gone and (theoretically) forgotten.

It is at moment like these - when I turn away from pursuing the change or simply become lazy in doing what I need to do - that I ultimately fail because I ultimately let myself off the hook.  Faced with that which is too painful or too disruptive to consider I simply let it sink back to the bottom of my life.  The result?  The life which I maintain now - not bad by any stretch of the imagination but hardly the thing that I hope and need it be.

And so, trembling, I face the light - hoping not so much that I can find that which I need in short order but that I will at least have the courage to stand as the chest of my soul is opened and all that is inside raises its collective head to the unfamiliar light of day.