Passage

We all have to get through various passages in life. Various minor or major crisis hit at most innocuous, or on the contrary at highly predictable times. Sometimes nothing in particular seems to bring them about. One fine day you just wake up to discover that your life is in bad need of repair. This may mean your relationships, your self confidence, your goals, your body, etc.. Sometimes what all is really about is an uncertainty, a desire, an urge to change, to switch direction. For many of us is an emptiness or feeling of desolation and solitude mostly self inflicted. On other occasions is a lack of purpose and consequently of intensity and passion. I will not venture in exploring the causes for my personal case. I relegate that to more private environments and media. I prefer this entry to be about the passages.

So one fine day suddenly or not you find yourself amid scaffolding. You have two options, take the plunge and make it a project as my American friends would call it or an experience as my French ones would, or resist the change and try to conserve certainty, illusions and memories however uncomfortable or miserable they are. Either way one can learn to appreciate the process. I have come to recognise the inevitability of passages and the inner scaffolding and mess that comes with personal change. Whether in order to salvage and restore or burn down and rebuild one can find tremendous joy in the passage. But when in such states one should wear big yellow and red signs reading 'Under Construction' and additional warnings for others as ' please wear protection gear at all times on this site'. It is so easy for us to think everybody must be a part of that construction site and actually contribute, enjoy and what not. I came to find these times necessary and useful. What was hared was to learn to enjoy the passage with its sinuous descent into darkness, uncertainty and uneasy feeling. Also I still grapple with the best way to avoid my own construction sites becoming a nightmare for neighbours and bypasses of every kind. I am getting better at it with age. I believe so at least some may strongly disagree but then have you ever seen a site without some form of discontentment.

Take the plunge, put on the hard hat and the yellow overall and start working on your next passage towards your new old life. And document it for further use!