No one told me...

The lessons I have learnt in my life have been myriad; some have been simple, others have been profound, some difficult, and others simply requiring a nod of the head before moving on. The hardest lessons were always the ones I was not prepared to learn. The ones that came without warning. Sailors, they say, keep close watch on the sky because she will tell them everything they need to know to keep themselves afloat. A story I read a long time ago says that the skies and the winds over land are inconsistent, shifting, and do not give us the warning that sailors have learnt, and passed on through the centuries.

Sometimes I feel like my gatekeeping tasks have me locked in a tower, watching the sky, but I don't know what I'm looking for. Is that cloud formation dark because the sun is going down? Is it shifting to the east or to the south? I get distracted by the lightning and the pageantry of the moon, and by the time the storm hits, I haven't rung any bells, I haven't sounded the alarms, and the air raid sirens are silent. What good am I, as a gatekeeper, then? What good am I as a sentinel? My watch began without instruction, and continues without guidance. I do not have the knowledge and skills passed down from generations past. I have not the preparation or the instincts to know when to raise the alarm. How, then, am I to succeed?

Logic in the Passenger Seat

There are moments in my life where I have stood on the brink and looked over the edge and ...hesitated. Opportunities swirled around my ankles like an outgoing tide. They ebb and flow, and of course, new opportunities will come in again; that is the nature of the universe. As I watch them slip away, finite and unique, I sigh, assure myself it was for the best, I need to make sound, logical decisions.

Last night was not one of those moments. Last night, I came up to the precipitous perch on the edge of new experience, and instead of hesitating, over-thinking, and fretting away the minutes, hours, days, until the decision was made for me, I jumped in with both feet. There are a few moments in my life when I can pinpoint this precise position, and I want to keep pushing myself past the point of comfort and security.

Feel your way through things. My therapist keeps giving me this advice. I'm a thinker. A ponderer, a puzzler, a real and rigorous ruminator. (Or would it be ruminatrix? I think I like that one better.) Last night, I leapt. I tumbled headlong into sensation, not sense.

I knew from the moment I met her, there was something different about the fae creature I saw last night. I do not know what it was, specifically, in that moment when our eyes first met and our grins reflected one another. The only two talking caught behind a freight train in the rain. A pleasant conversation, a gleam of something more interesting, and it seemed to be nothing more than an incidental encounter. A single-serving friend. (She kept using that phrase last night. This morning. Whatever. I had to look it up because I couldn't remember the reference. (In my defence the only time I've seen Fight Club was back in high school and most of the film was spent wrestling RJ and Scottie for the best spot on the couch.)) Much to my surprise (which the hyperlogical side of me wants to qualify and quantify, to weigh and winnow through, to understand the WHY) despite our not exchanging good contact information (I had a business card with a website and generic email address to go on; she only had a name, and not a given name), she found me and decided that we would be friends.

I tend to look at myself and ask, Why me? Why do remarkable, curious, awesome people want to know me? Why did my wife text me when I missed my first practice? How can a line of poetry and a quote from a tv programme cement a relationship? What is it about me that made her seek me out? I told this one I felt so commonplace next to her. I heard her stories and felt, this is a person I would create in fiction, not a person whom I would meet, flesh and bone, blood and soul, on the street, and hear their stories. I don't understand what it is about me that people seek me out, it is strange, novel, foreign, and daunting, but last night I realised I should not worry about it so much. I should just accept it, graciously.

It turns out, it's hard not be graciously accepting of people insisting they want to be around you when one is wrapped up in the most magnificent cuddle puddle imaginable. With people who accepted me as a stranger in their midst, who were ostensibly all strangers to me, where despite being in a place I'd never been with persons I never met, I felt completely, totally, beautifully safe. And I trusted just a little bit. It's been so long since I did that.

I made my choice. I took that chance. I jumped off the ledge. I plunged into feeling. And it was wonderful.