Good morning…
I am drawn back between the covers of an inspiring book I taught in our living room a few years back.
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Excerpt from Brene Brown’s The Gifts Of Imperfection
People call what happens at midlife “a crisis,” but it’s not. It’s an unraveling – a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.
Midlife is certainly one of the great unraveling journeys, but there are others the happen to us over the course of our lives:
- marriage
- divorce
- becoming a parent
- recovery
- moving
- an empty nest
- retiring
- experiencing loss or trauma
- working in a soul-sucking job
The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button. (xii-xiii)
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Next to her list I have handwritten some other common bough-breaking experiences our class unraveled together.
- graduation from a familiar life phase
- job loss or change
- a financial nosedive
- a debilitating accident
- a difficult diagnosis
- the betrayal of a friend group or a trusted individual
- verbal, physical, or sexual abuse
- attraction vibes with someone off limits
- infertility or miscarriages
- unwanted singleness or childlessness
- death of a deeply loved pet or person
- living through a natural disaster
When we are nesting in the life-giving limb of our dreams and the bough suddenly breaks, our comfortable cradle comes crashing down and the life we once loved unravels as we fall.
“It was a long year,” Brene writes after her blaring wake-up call. “I lovingly refer to it on my blog as the 2007 Breakdown/Spiritual Awakening. If felt like a textbook breakdown to me, but Diana (my therapist) called it a spiritual awakening. I think we were both right. In fact, I’m starting to question if you can have one without the other.”
Wake up and strengthen whatever you have left, teetering on the brink of death, for I’ve found that your works are far from complete in the eyes of my God (Revelation 3:2, CEB).
…Sue…
