Margaret Dulaney: The Great Door
If God were a fretter, and I don't pretend to know whether or not this is true, I assume that the thing that would keep him up at night would be the question of what his children will be bringing back with them when they come home from this life. Like parents who send their twelve-year-old off to camp, there is the hope that the child will learn more than how to torture bugs, short sheet beds and smoke.
I think most would agree that when we cross through the Great Door and back to that old Home of ours, the only thing that we will be able to carry with us is the person we have become. All else will be left behind: our earthly accomplishments, our awards, fame, piles of stuff, successes, failures, mortgages, debts, all of the stuff of life that we have stirred up, even our relationships (we pass through that door alone).
Imagine. We can shove nothing else into our little backpack, nothing, but this person that we have become.
I confess I find the notion perfectly exhilarating.
Some hint of what this might look like might be understood by simply studying our lives. It is quite impossible to divide our thoughts, our feelings, our attitudes from the circumstances of our lives. We are so closely knit. One could almost say that our lives perfectly describe our selves. We are made of the same airborne stuff as our earth, our galaxy. Our temperaments are like the wind: sometimes stirring, sometimes placid, occasionally raging, rarely perfectly still. By looking at the effect the soul's current of air has had on the surrounding stuff of life, we understand ourselves.
"By their fruits ye shall know them." Jesus explains.
When I was thirty-three I picked up the pen for the first time. Before this time I seemed to be content with reading. Plays were the first things that I chose to write and I occupied myself with this effort for over twelve years. Perhaps because I had come to the profession at a fairly late age, I never sent a play out without numerous apologies for not knowing what I was doing and assurances of gratefully handing over any ownership of opinion at the first rehearsal. You can imagine that this attitude attracted every bossy-pants in the business. Like honey to a bear, my gooey insecurity was irresistible to the manipulative, and it was nearly impossible for me to find a director whom I could call a true partner. As a result, most of my experiences as a writer in the theater were painful power struggles. The philosopher Rudolf Steiner suggests that our immaturities seek pain. I think he's right.
By the time I began to write nonfiction, my confidence had grown a bit, and the first editor I approached to help me with a collection of essays was so exactly right for me that we still work together after ten years. She is a true partner.
Lately I've been trying to wrap my mind around the idea that at any moment one's trajectory can shift, and quite another person can come into being. As if we were all great sailing vessels in the open sea, the potential for a storm to blow up and knock us off course is always there. Our ships are rather cumbersome, and it takes a while to change direction, but we can and do change, and this new direction often leads us somewhere quite wonderful.
My Yoga teacher, at some point in every class, asks her students to put their hands together in prayer position over their hearts and set an intention for the day. I'm never quite sure what to intend. If my own intention is anything short of God's intention for me, in other words, if it would send me off in a direction that would not lead me somewhere good, than I would hope to be kept from following this misguided intention.
I realized at some point while writing plays that I wished to be more confident so that the bullying I was experiencing would cease. I knew that I could not muscle myself into a state of confidence, and I don't believe that it would have helped me to set an intention of being more confident, as there is a note of force behind the idea of setting an intention and a healthy sense of confidence cannot be forced. I felt my only hope was to pray for confidence to be given to me. Or, I should say, pray for confidence to grow in me, since a sudden onset of confidence would look much more like arrogance.
Looking back, it is clear to me that my lack of confidence created a series of small tempests to blow up in my life, and I can see that each one caused me to slightly shift my direction. Miraculously, with each new tack, I seemed to come a tiny bit nearer to the person that I wished to become, the one I would be most willing to take with me through the Great Door. It's still summer around here though and I presume there will be many more squalls in my sails.
Visit Margaret's website at ListenWell.org