Home for the Holidays

I arrived home yesterday, putting an end (for now) to my travels and to this whirlwind chapter of my life.  My international travels lasted just shy of half a year, almost from solstice to solstice.  Today, the Winter Solstice, is my first full day home.  From today, and for the next six months, the days will get longer, the nights shorter.  I find the allegory inspiring.

I’m both curious and excited to see what the future holds for me now that I’m back while trying to not peer too far into the future, to stay present in this moment.  Being home presents a unique challenge for me – how to establish a new life, and a new self, among familiar faces and places; how to keep from my past that which still serves me while not allowing that which doesn’t to drag me down and hold me back.  How to not slip back into the same old life that made me miserable, basically.

It’s not such a unique challenge, really.  Every morning, every moment, brings every one of us the chance to be new, if we want to be.  To see the world as new and full of possibilities, if we want to see that.  To clear out what makes us miserable and make room for something new and wonderful to come into our lives.

I wasn’t able to do any of that before.  I tried, but I wasn’t strong enough.  I wasn’t able to keep my negative thoughts and emotions and my outsized fears from overriding my will to be new, to see the world as new, to clear out what didn’t serve me to make room for what would.  Paramahansa Yogananda has said that environment is greater than will, and that was definitely true for me.  My will wasn’t strong enough to overcome the environmental pressures I felt around me.  So, I bailed, subconsciously seeking an environment that would support my will to see the world as new, and to see myself as new.  Solo traveling the world – where literally everything is new – makes seeing and becoming new not just easy, but practically inevitable.

But, I’m home now.  Everything seems familiar, known.  Have I gained the strength to see the world as new every day?  To see myself as new every moment?  Time will tell.

I’ve been slowly plodding through A Course in Miracles over the last several months.  From time to time, the chapter I happen to be reading speaks so directly to what I’m going through at that moment as to seem miraculous, like divine guidance coming to me through the pages of the book.  This happened again while reading the following text as my plane taxied the last few feet to my gate at LAX, leaving me feeling blessed and with a renewed optimism for what lay ahead:

…all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is still here and now.  Forgive the past and let it go, for it is gone…There is no hindrance to the Will of God nor any need that you repeat again a journey that was over long ago.

TL;DR:  I’m home.