Peeling the Onion

It is not unusual, or particularly original, for people to compare their lives to journeys. Perhaps especially for lifestylers, the analogy seems apt because most of us started out "somewhere else," and end up "here." Our discourse is full of trip and travel related expressions as we talk metaphorically of our "path," or "the road," or "coming safely home."

I have used that kind of language myself. Over and over.

In simplest terms, the journey analogy works because nearly all of us have found ourselves in different "places" throughout our lifetimes. Most of us are entirely immersed in western philosophical thinking and we perceive time linearly. Ours is a cultural milieu that supports our left-brained tendency to string moments together in a line, one right after the other like so many beads. That is the understanding of reality that creates for us the sense of past, present, and not yet.

So, I can very easily imagine how my sometimes difficult childhood put me on the trajectory toward my safe but stultifying marriage. It doesn't seem at all outrageous to postulate that the constraints of that life drove me to push and poke and imagine. That emotional looking toward the horizon eventually led me out of that life and into this one. The hungry and sexually curious woman used her need and her courage to move out of the expected into the alternative -- and her fire and passion drove right through the dry and arid transition to post-menopause. Reading here, and before this, at The Swan's Heart, there does seem to be some sort of current that carries us all from one thing to the next, step by step -- on the journey.

And maybe that really is the way it is. One thing follows another. Antecedents become causative. String the bow, release the arrow to its flight, and the arc of its flight follows as surely as the hours of the clock come in their sequence.

Sometimes though, I sense that there is another way to think about the coming to where we are now. Because there is something about the journey image that I find disquieting -- in traveling, one has to leave behind one place in order to arrive at another. Did I really travel away from that child who struggled so with the vagaries of life with alcoholic parents? Did I somehow leave that earnest young wife back in the shoals of those unhappy years? And the me that dared to take the chance to reach for a possibility?

Aren't they still right here with me? I think I can feel each one of them, remember each of the moments they lived, be who they were with just a bit of a slip of my awareness... Layers upon layers, and each of them are me.

It is like peeling an onion. Me. And me. And me. And me. Until there is nothing at all left, and that too is me.

That sort of imagery endorses the sense I have that being in the life I am living is part of being whole and authentic and vividly myself. I like that. I like understanding that who I am today is simply a deeper and richer expression of who I was in each of those moments over all of these years; and that, for all my days, layer by layer, there will be deeper depths to explore.

swan