Digging myself out of a Rut

I don't know if you have noticed, but I am in the process of change. Deep personal change. A reconstruction of how I see myself in this wacky world. I am digging down deep.

It isn't that sudden heart-stopping explosive change that happens to you when you leap headfirst into the chasm. Its more like a gradual inner realization, the opening of a flower and everything that can happen because of it.

My inner eye has been attracted to positive energy lately, an attraction I have never experienced before on such a level. It is feeding me in a place that is starved and shrivelled. And I am still hungry.

Coming from a crusty, sarcastic queen like me, this is quite something. Its cramping my style.

It might have started when I was up in the CN tower in Toronto on New Year's Eve, in the wee hours before 2010. I was with all four of my boys on the observation deck observing the city from up high, we were glowing alternately with red and green light as the lit tower transformed itself for the city.

As we went around and around the circular deck, the lighted contours of the city down below, I would see my kids ahead of me, completely washed in red and then gradually in green taking in the view. And it struck me how that wash of colour changed things. When they were washed in green it felt fake (this is Christmas tinsel green - probably the worst shade of it) and slow and, life-sucking, but when they were washed in red, there was a feeling of energy, possibility...

And thats when I had the "aha". Strange to have an "aha" in the CN tower... of all cheesy things to happen...but when do "aha's" happen on beautiful mountain tops? Its usually when we're picking out shampoo. Or seeing the world not from a mountain top but from a tall, cheesy space pod shaped building.

The universe has a superb sense of humour.

I had been ruminating (as I am wont to do) about my career future, as I've been in school forever and was at the beginning of the last semester of my ESL teaching program at U of T.  I needed to get a job - and was thinking of the prospects of getting a decent job teaching academic English to foreign students here in Toronto, and from my perspective, my chances were bleak compared to other people in my program, I had no experience teaching, nor do I have a masters degree, nor do I...

I was in the old rut, a very familiar rut of despair, of giving up. From this rut, I then had the "aha". My weather beaten, trusty old rut of despair, as familiar and cozy as it was, was getting a little suffocating.

 

I realized that what had to change was not what was out of my control, but what was in my control. Not a knew concept to me, none of this was, but it all knit together into something new - i think thats how "ahas" happen - an accumulation of events and thoughts, feelings and experiences that come to a head with one trigger -  like seeing red for instance -.

I knew down to the bone that it was all about how I chose to see the world. It was my choice entirely. I had that kind of power. I was not a victim of the world and its goings ons.  That old rut  was doing the poisoning - and only if I let it.

It had, in the past, for as long as I knew, caused me great suffering. The fact that I was an introvert growing up in an extrovert-prizing world didn't help either, but I thought I had rooted it out when I realized that it had helped feed my string of mini depressions. They're long gone, as I had managed to at least control how long I would sit in that rut before the big "D" would set in it's talons.

But that didn't fill in the rut. Despite my more sunny mentality in the last years, I have not broken my habit of stepping in that rut long enough to sell myself short. It did not dawn on me that I was clinging to an old form - and that imbedded sarcasm was one sign of this - a sign of anger over being powerless - a victim of circumstance. I see this now and I am embarassed. temporarily. will   not   step in   that   rut.

I went back to school this January with the residue of that image - the glow of red, and within weeks I felt that, yes, I think I can do this, yes, I think I am more than qualified with other alternative teaching experiences, yes, my skills in flexibility and facilitation, my background in cultural studies and conflict studies - I am going to focus on who I really am - all the positives, and I am going to make them grow. I am going to reign in all the manufactured negativities and instead, cultivate the habit of seeing with red positivity. as strange as it is to do so.

Its like I have entered a new room, and so far, I like how this strange new room feels.

I am going to aim high, and gradually get there - step by step, twig by twig, obstacle by obstacle.

Steering clear of that rut until it slowly fills in, inch by inch.

Then I'm going to plant a garden, right on top. With a little red seat so I can take it all in.
Got any ruts you have to dig yourself out of ? 

(My Aunt Hilda's Garden, 2006)