safely docked at harbor… maybe?
When I think back on my life, the further back I go, the more fond the memories are. There is something inherently safe about being a child and being taken care of. As a young child, your job is simply to live, all the anxieties of life don’t concern you… as well they shouldn’t. But that is the thing about getting older, growing up; the older you get, the more there is to worry about. In recent years, I felt overwhelmed with responsibility and concern for the future. I had a great job, a reasonable mortgage and a big car payment on my new truck, a terminally ill father and I lived on the opposite side of the county from the rest of my family. To top it all off, I was deeply unsettled at my church and was also struggling to hear God’s voice in my life.
At the time, I considered my life a rudderless ship being blown carelessly by the wind and tossed about by reckless crashing swells. I felt out of control and anxiety weighed on me enough to require medication to control the frequent occurrence of panic attacks. Things seemed to be changing in my life at a record pace and I had no idea where I was headed and, at some level, I felt helpless to change my situation. My great paying job was something I no longer enjoyed and at times, even disdained. I was physically, emotionally and spiritually unsettled and the sense of pending doom prevailed enough to keep me in a constant depressed funk. I felt trapped in some chaotic tempest–that was until a chance to travel to Kenya to shoot documentary video footage gave me the taste of something new.
At the the end of November 2005, I began an adventure of a lifetime to Kenya, Africa; at the time however, it didn’t seem much like an adventure. I always had a concept of what an adventure was–in my mind it is always fun and exciting, but that’s not how real adventures begin–a real adventure always begins with peril. My adventure began with a delay at the airport as security picked my video equipment apart enough for me to almost miss my flight. You would think that almost missing something wasn’t much of a peril, but the fact that I was the last person on the flight meant that all of the overhead storage was filled and I was forced to check $6,000 worth of video equipment at the gate. That wasn’t the end of it, before I was to arrive in Kenya I would lose my video equipment, miss my connecting flight to Amsterdam, get stuck in Minnesota in November with only a short sleeve shirt on, miss meeting up with the rest of my party in Amsterdam, fly into Kenya alone with no way to contact anyone and end up $2 short on the cash fee to get my visa endorsement to enter into the country.
For a person who was prone to anxiety, depression and sudden bouts of panic attacks, the beginning of the adventure didn’t leave me in ruin, it actually set me free. When I stood at the carousel in Minnesota waiting for my video equipment, the anxiety began to build, I felt sick at my stomach and the sense of doom wrapped around me like a heavy wet blanket. Eventually, I was the last one left standing as the gears and belts eased to a stop and the realization the my video equipment was not there began to grip me. Like a punch in the stomach, I was left without breath an deflated.
As the idea of losing my equipment settled in, a dark depression overcame me and the feeling of retreat built–all I wanted to do was go back home to Phoenix. But if I had given up, the adventure would have been diminished and the release never experienced. A helpful employee at the airport (and probably the only helpful employee at Northwest Airlines) searched for my gear. In a last ditch effort, the employee fired up the carousel in the long shot that the bag was stuck somewhere in the bowels of the mechanical monster. After a moment of fruitless spinning, the monster belched up a blue PortaBrace equipment bag and the first reward of peril raised its head.
After being reunited with my equipment, the anxiety fog lifted and wet blanket of depression sloughed off like skin from a ripe boiled tomato. Suddenly peril was something to be overcome and not feared and the rest of what would become my African adventure was underway. When I returned home to Phoenix, it was clear to me that it was time to for me to leave. The storm that I experienced during my trip helped me find my rudder and aided in the rigging of the sails properly to power through the breaking waves. The next four months would pass quickly, I would beat the collapsing housing bubble in Phoenix and ended up with six full price offers on the first weekend that my house was listed. My transition from Phoenix to Nashville was smooth and I felt full of purpose and intention–four full sails to the wind and cruising at an even keel.
A year has passed and I find myself in a completely different state. I left my well paying job in November and began a planned three month hiatus in attempts to explore some creative outlets. During that time, several film projects went bust and almost nothing that I intended to do, got done. Now it has been six months since I left my job and I am still on hiatus, taking only a single web job in attempts to reverse the cash flow. For six months almost nothing has happened–well, that isn’t true, quite a lot has happened. What started as a creative hiatus, became a personal exploration that would lead me to personal revelations and force me to set new boundaries.
For such a long time, I felt tossed about and rudderless, now I find myself in quite a different state– completely motionless. Recently, I began to struggle with the sense of stillness in my life. I felt like a ship in dead water; no wind, no waves and no peril. For some, this might be a desirable state of being, but for me, it makes me restless. Nothing seems more useless than a ship in listless waters and I have been letting this state of being bother me; I yearn again for an adventure.
The other day, I had lunch with my pastor, and as often occurs in conversation with him, the vein of conversation finds just the groove that it needs to find. At some point in the conversation, I offered up my metaphor of the listless ship and explained that I have recently been feeling like I was trapped in dead waters. What I received as a response, caught me by surprise. It was suggested that I was reading the signals incorrectly. Perhaps instead of a ship at sea with no wind and furled sails restlessly waiting for change, I was safely docked at port repairing damage and preparing for the next voyage–something about that resonated with me.
It’s amazing what a change of perspective can do for you. I often find myself in a negative mindset, this is something that I have actively been working on, but this simple fresh look at what is going on in my life has allowed me to switch from restlessness to eagerness. I am now gaining a new perspective on what I believed was wasted months and it is turning out to be a period of structural repair work as I prepare a new journey ahead. While there is a new sense of eager hopefulness, I think that there will always be that sense of restlessness, I want to know where I am headed on this next major journey of life. Sometimes being uncertain about something can cause you to be still and listen; well, I am listening and hopefully knowing that I may be safely docked in one of life harbors might give me the opportunity to permit that still quiet voice to speak something exciting into my life.