13 Days to go...

While 13 days when I was young seemed to drag on and on...now I'm ever so aware that time moves like a freight train coming down the tracks.

We've just returned from some fascinating training and mentoring time in California. This trip officially makes the 6th trip with airline travel since April. Each trip provided some distraction from the major life change that is on it's way. Now, there is no avoiding the reality.

Details feel like confetti shot out of cannons billowing down all around us. One day I'll feel masterful and accomplished. The next, as though I'm being drawn backward. There's the house sale (or the non-sale as yet), the daily purging of items that we have grown familiar with and comfortable around. Of course those issues are here at the Old Place. As for now, the New Place and all it's adjustments, stressors and unsettled matters will have to wait until we can get to them.

Most sobering during our mentoring time was the discussion meant to prepare us to think about what life will be like in the New Place and the effects on our identities. We've been made aware that we will go from feeling like professional, capable people to feeling like children, dependent on everyone to help us get along. In The Old Place, we've believed that we were often in "control" of our lives. We could go when and where we wanted, say what we wanted, ask no permission and judge for ourselves what was best in nearly every situation. This will be no more. In The New Place we will have no control. No control.

Don't we often hear "control is an illusion?" So many times we've been reminded and half-heartedly we nod our heads in agreement...but I've never believed it. Never. May we bend and not break as we release control.

Getting rid of most of the things we've owned is such an intriguing social experiment. It is difficult, but only in waves of separation anxiety. We are not dispensing with any family heirlooms. We have saved our precious family pictures and mementos of the road we've been on. But everything else, even the things we're struggling to pry from our fingers, is on it's way out. We've a strange suspicion that this is going to be very freeing. We'll see.

Somewhere during this process the reality has come upon us that when we're clutching so tightly to the "stuff" of life and the yearning for control our hands are closed...and closed hands cannot receive more blssng. So I've been working on visualizing the hands of my heart remaining open so that the "stuff" can flow out easily and we can receive whatever is meant for us.

With hands wide open...