Permission to be New

Now that it’s finally now, everything is new to me, and I am new to everything.  My life has been changing a lot in the past few years, months, weeks and days, and I suspect that yours may have been changing just as much.  A lot of the things I learned about life years ago, both things I was told by others and things I was taught directly by my own experience, just don’t seem to apply anymore.  

I used to feel that I was living in two worlds, my own inner world, where things are magical and beautiful and full of possibilities which resonate with my heart, and the outer world, which was supposedly real but felt false, where I had to pretend to be the sort of person who lives in that world, and pretend that any of it made sense to me.  Over the last few years, I started to cultivate friendships and have experiences which caused the two worlds to overlap, and I felt that I was able to stop pretending and bring out the person I truly am to share with the rest of the world.  I found that others would also stop pretending around me and would show me their true selves.  I realized that all of those “other people”, the ones who go around acting “normal”, must all have real selves hiding in there somewhere, and the supposed “real world” to which we had all adapted ourselves was truly the illusion.

Over the last few months, weeks, and days, I have felt more and more that the false “real world” is falling away, breaking apart, dissolving, fading.  I have noticed more sharply the habit I have of trying to fit myself - my expression, my actions and my expectations -  into the shape of the “real world”, and realized that this is no longer necessary.  It is now time for each of us to assert our own true shapes, and in doing this, we will re-shape the world into one which resonates with our true hearts.

This is a beautiful and terrible time.  It is the time to be brave and look into the dark depths of ourselves and recover what has been hiding there, bring it into the light, examine it, accept it deeply and fully as part of ourselves.  As if this weren’t scary enough, the world in which all of this deep, intense personal growth and evolution is taking place is also going through painful growth, evolution, upheaval, revolution.  Many of the institutions and conventions which we had long taken for granted, whether they made us feel safe or made us feel trapped or both, are changing or disappearing.  There is now  the possibility of a whole lot of freedom and not a lot of security.

All of my resentments about what limits me are hopelessly out of date now, as are many of my fears and insecurities about myself.  So many of the things I worry about or feel like I have to take care of don’t even exist anymore.  My old habits are not even possible to keep.  So what do I do now?

It is time to be new.  It is time to let everything be new.  Being new at something often means not being very good at it at first.  The first time you tried to walk, you fell down.  That didn’t teach you the lesson that you are no good at this walking thing and ought to give up and stop making a fool of yourself.  Instead, it taught you to keep getting up and trying until walking became so easy and so natural to you that you probably don’t remember now what it was like to fall over and over and over.  Toddlers are used to that kind of lesson, but the older we get, the more skills we acquire and start taking for granted, the worse we get at remembering that first and most important lesson.  

Maybe in your adult life, you have tried to learn a new skill - playing a musical instrument, dancing, painting, knitting, speaking a second or third language - and you have found out that you are very bad at it, and what you tried to do came out all wrong.  All this really means is that you are learning, and learning is all about things you don’t know yet, so you are supposed to be getting it all wrong at first.  The lesson is not that you are bad at the new thing you are trying; the lesson is that you need to let yourself be bad at it and still keep going - if you keep going, you will start to get better.  If you love what you are doing and love to practice doing it, you will probably get better and better until you do that thing very well, and you can’t imagine going through life without doing that wonderful thing that you do so well, that thing which is so much a part of who you truly are.

This lesson about the nature of learning now applies to much more than music and dancing and painting and knitting.  It now applies to living.  It is time for us all to learn new ways of living, ways not based on all the structures and limitations and safeguards of the past.  It is time to be brave and base our new ways of living on what comes from within, not what used to come from without.  It is time to shape the world to fit our true selves, no more to distort ourselves to fit the illusory world.  As we start doing this, we will feel the joy of allowing free expression of our true selves, but we will also feel the fear and embarrassment and sometimes the pain which comes from being really bad at something we are just starting to learn how to do.

So, be kind to your new self, your tender, uncoordinated young self, your stumbling toddler self.  Just as you would not tell a toddler “You’re no good at this walking thing.   Just give up before you fall and hurt yourself again,” don’t let your fear be your guide.  Instead tell yourself “Come on, try again, I know you can do this!  This is exciting!  This is fun!  You were born to do this!  Come on, I’ve got you, I’ll catch you and we’ll keep going.  You are getting so good at this!  I can’t wait to see you grow into the person you are becoming!”

We can do this.  We’ve got this.  We are getting good at this.  I can’t wait to see us all grow into the people we are becoming!

Good Job, Everyone!

Wishbringer Molly Blue Dawn, High Priestess of Serendipity