When my knee started hurting last October someone told me, “Knees are your moving forward parts.  When you’re having trouble with them it means you’re resisting.” (Funnily enough, the person telling me was the same person I felt I needed to move forward from).  When I told my chiropractor that he said incredulously, “What, don’t you WANT to move forward?!”  Well, yes I did, I felt, but I also said that the moving forward entails leaving something behind and that was what I felt I had the resistance to.  I’ve never been good at moving on.  I mean, I look like I am.  I’m very good at booking tickets, jumping into cabs, walking away, saying “I’ve had enough of this” to many people on many occasions.  But as I’m packing, turning the corner, taking a few steps, or out of the situation… I.am.shaking.

I have a deep sense of loss, instilled in me at an early age as I watched my dad storm out of the apartment with only his guitar on his back and his blood running down his knuckles from punching my parents’ bedroom door.  I was four.  And I think I’ve been wrestling with transitions ever since.  Once I’m on the plane, out of the cab, to my next destination or with the next person, I’m totally fine.  It’s that free falling, trust calling phase in between that is so emotional….and painful in my knee.  And I can see that this space between complaining and fed-upness and actually having something new is important, valuable, and you’ll miss it if you’re impatiently focused on why isn’t what’s next already here!  My receptors aren’t open yet, I’m not a match to it yet, I may think I’m ready, but I’m not.  I’ve still got work to do; and when I release and just get busy doing the work I find it’s got a beauty all it’s own.  And I know when it passes.  I feel it, like watching clouds clear the sky for the sun.  Just like that.  And I wonder what I was ever so worried about.  And all I feel is freshness and gratitude.  And I don’t care that I didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day or that there’s this zit on my face that won’t seem to go away.  I’m new, the purpose has been served, the storm is over and I walk as the new person I was wanting to become.