Nothing Was Wasted

In Tuesday’s post, I wrote about how almost all of us resist our callings. We deny them, we try to rationalize them away, we avoid them out of fear.

That has certainly been true in my life. There were years for me of not doing the things I most love to do – writing, dance, being creative, being on stage. There were years of not answering the call to do the kind of work I do now.

I had an instinct to say something in Tuesday’s post about why that’s alright, why it’s really alright that we miss out on our callings for years – painful though it is – but I couldn’t quite find succinct words for what I wanted to say.

What kept popping up into my heart and mind were these words, “That’s okay, because life is long,” or even – more provocatively – “That’s okay, that’s why life is long.”

Huh? Where did that come from, another part of my mind asked back. I got a little intimidated about writing that – because life isn’t long for everyone and because it’s more than a little bold to declare why you think life is long. My inner critic got a little worried about what would happen if I wrote those words.

But they’ve stayed with me, especially after I read some responses to Tuesday’s post, like from Corina, who wrote, “I now realize that I missed several callings because I was letting the noise of the outside world drown out my own inner voice.”

Yes. I think that’s the story for all of us.

Somehow, it seems, straying from our callings is a part of what we all do in this life. We leave who we really are. And then we find our way back home again.

Most of us will get many years to do this.  Life is giving, forgiving, and grants us time to learn the lessons that push us to make the return.

I suppose why that matters to talk about is that it allows us to each see our own journeys as okay, even as beautiful. It allows us to see the lost time as an essential part of the picture – and by that I mean the time we were lost, not time that was lost – because no moment is ever wasted.

For me, the lost years are so important. They made me more grateful for these years. They taught me what it feels like to stem the river inside of me – and why doing that won’t really ever work for me – too much sadness and bitterness comes as a result. The lost years taught me a lot about who I really am and how that part of me won’t die out – even if I ignore it. The lost years also were what allowed me to learn some important things about how we find our own way back home.

Every  moment of playing small contributes to the fire to play big. Every day spent separated from our callings contributes to the eventual devotion with which we’ll pursue them, and the gratitude we’ll have for them.

Sometimes there are tears of sadness, of grief that we need to cry for the lost years, and what we put ourselves through during them. But know this: those years were not wasted.

Love,

Tara