I'M ON MY WAY ...

I love to read. One of the things that helps me determine whether or not I'm reading a good book is if I can 'see' myself in it somewhere. Perhaps in the main character - or reflected in that character's friends, family members or somewhere in the greater community.

If I want to be the person I'm reading about, or I'd love to know that person, for whatever reason ~ I love the book. If I'm inspired by the character(s), the qualities they bring to life, the challenges they face and either work through, or don't ~ I'm grateful for participating in the experience.

More than ten years ago, I read a book called The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg. Briefly, it's about a woman named Nan who just turned fifty, and is dealing with how it feels to be an aging woman in this culture. She is very much focused on all she is losing. She decides to just leave on a driving trip, and the novel alternates between entries she makes in a journal and letters to her husband, Martin. By the end of the book, she has switched her focus from all she's losing to all she actually has.

There's a passage in this book that I return to every now and then ~ as not only do I sometimes feel this way myself - but I'm quite aware that others in my sphere of existence do as well: It's found on page 274 and it reads like this:

And now, in my own stillness, I hear something. 'Where have you been?' my inside body whispers to my outside one. Its sense of outrage is present, but dulled by the grief of abandonment. 'I had ideas. There were things to do. Where did you go?'

What can I answer? Oh, I had some errands to run. I had a few things to do. I needed to get married and have a child and go underground for 25 years, be pleasantly suffocated. I meant to come back. But the bread crumbs got blown away.

So many of us have drifted. Some of us don't really remember who we used to be - and we don't feel completely comfortable with who we're living as now. Or we're caught in transition ~ on the way out of one phase of our lives, knowing that we're to step into the next one - and not entirely sure what that step should be, where it should be placed, for what purpose.

We are questioning what lights us up from the inside out ~ or we're fully aware of what fuels our inner light but we're not sure how to bring that into the reality we're existing in so far.

What if our bread crumbs didn't blow away? What if, when we're ready to look back, clues to who we once were lay waiting for us to decipher - and like scattered bread crumbs, we could pick up the ones that we want to re-integrate into who we now are and allow the others to blow away?

What bread crumbs would you see, the ones you'd want to keep and put in your pocket to remind you who you are? And how might these bread crumbs help you clarify your next step on the path of where you're going, from Here to There?