when dreaming ends

I’ve mentioned the Daily Om before. Because they come to my inbox so late in the day, I generally read them the next morning. This is the Daily Om message that I read on Friday.

Walking Through – When Doors Open

When a door opens, walk through it. Trust that the door has opened for a reason and you have been guided to it. Sometimes we have a tendency to overanalyze or agonize over the decision, but it is quicker to simply go through the door and discover what’s there as that’s the only way to know. Even if it doesn’t seem right at first, opening this door may lead to another door that will take us where we need to go.

Doors open when the time is right for us to enter a new space, metaphorically speaking, and we can have faith that walking through is the right thing to do. Sometimes we linger in the threshold because we are afraid of leaving our old life for a life we know nothing about. We may have voices inside of our heads that try to hold us back or people in our lives saying discouraging things. These voices, internal and external, are known as threshold spirits, and they express all the fears and doubts that arise at the beginning of a new life. Nevertheless, none of these voices can hold us back, and they will fall silent as soon as we cross the threshold.

There are many doors that open in the course of our lives, leading us into new relationships, jobs, friendships, and creative inspirations. Our lives up to this point are the result of all the doors we have walked through, and our continued growth depends on our willingness to keep moving into new spaces. Every time we walk through an open door, we create a sense memory that encourages us to move into the new fearlessly. When we enter the new space, we almost always feel a thrill and a new feeling of confidence, in ourselves and in the universe. We have stepped across the threshold into a new life.

Throughout this crisitunity, the Daily Oms have been either completely resonant with my situation or completely irrelevant (i.e. Squirrel Medicine). This is an example of resonance, and it’s the message that prodded me into finally trying to put my feelings down about getting another paralegal job.

Things seemed completely clear in the first days after I told I was being laid off. This was how I’d break out of my ordinary life, how I’d move into the life that I wanted, the one I’d been visualizing consciously for two years and unconsciously for much longer. I’d take a deep breath and I’d launch off into thin air, depending on my creative talent entirely for the first time ever. I keep seeing examples of people who manage to do this, who sustain themselves in situations when to me it seems impossible to do so. So why not me? I could try it, right?

The thing is, I have tens of thousands of dollars of debt, our household budget is pretty tight, and I make more than half the money between us. For us to live with me trying to depend on my creative talent, one or all of the following would have to happen:

• I’d have to get a book published that was successful enough to earn a good advance and decent royalties, which is highly unlikely even if you have publishing credits and a trendy book in the can, ready for publishers and agents to look at. Which I don’t.
• I’d have to be teaching yoga at least every day, to quite a lot of students per class.
  • Which means I’d have to get training immediately and find more than a couple of places that need teachers.
• I’d have to do one of these things and also have another job that could make ends meet, something either part-time or with a very flexible schedule.

When the reality of all this hit me, and when the donations slowed to an eventual stop, I realized that all there was to it was I’d just have to find another full-time paralegal job. That this was not the time for launching. That the air was thin and I truly had nothing of value to keep me afloat.

No door had opened for me. It was only an illusion; I am ever in the same room.

The feeling lingers in my mind that if I work hard to get a paralegal job, the magical thinking is that I don’t deserve and can’t live the creative life I’m visualizing. One of the little voices is protesting that if I don’t give it a college try I’ll never know, and by thinking only of my obligations without having faith that it’ll work out somehow because after all a door has been opened for me, I’m assuring that I won’t be able to do the creative thing. But I still live with too much fear, too much responsibility, to be able to trust that.

It’s not that I don’t believe I’ll ever teach. Nor do I believe that I won’t write, or live a creative life. But I grieve for the fact that it will apparently be impossible for me to walk through into a new life as effortlessly as this Daily Om would lead me to believe.

The thing is, the lesson that my life to this point has taught me is that the only risks available to me are exceedingly low-risk risks. Moving away from New England with nothing in my pocket – but I was moving back to live with my dad, quite a cushion. I live with BF in a house that he owns, but his parents pay half the mortgage and can always help us out if we need it.

I don’t want to be doing the low-risk thing, looking for another paralegal job and hoping that I land it. I don’t want to be expending my heart’s effort on that. I want to be figuring out how to live that difficult, creative life. But right now the only thing I can think to do is keep tightening my belt, keep saving my money, keep working a moderately well-paying job so I can do it later.

These difficult weeks have convinced me that this is what it is, that if I chose not to get another paralegal job and tried to make it by the seat of my pants, I’d wind up broke and missing payments and lost again, and all the work I did to climb out of that particular hole over the last four years would have been wasted. I don’t know if that means I’ve been defeated into thinking small again, or whether my anxiety has ruined this opportunity for me, or whether it truly was meant to be this way and the time is later rather than now.