I've been thinking a lot about discernment, as you might imagine.
It's not a subject most people know anything about. It's not something I knew anything about until I started hanging out with Ms. P, who at the time was all up in the nuns, who were themselves all up in Ignatian discernment. And since then, I've gone through Quaker practice, read books on meditation and Buddhism and spiritual enlightenment, attended meditation workshops, jumped into spiritual direction twice, and sat my own butt down on the cushion.
Until I started accreting all of this experience and until I started living out of it, I made decisions -- and believed decisions should be made -- mostly on the basis of "what made sense." There were certain "bottom line" responsibilities that created the ground of all decisions: the expectation of a career instead of a job, the need to be financially solvent and prudent, the general bounds of good sense and good taste. In the space that was left, desire certainly played a part, but it was desire tempered by "being practical."
And wow, did that not work. Oh, it got me external trappings of success. I got that PhD. I got that tenure-track job. I bought a house and got a dog and settled into what was supposed to be the rest of my life.
And I hated it.
On some level, it did match the vision I had somewhere inside of me of my right life, but only on the surface. I wanted domesticity and working from home and peace, and to some extent I had those things, but I didn't have creativity, I didn't have passion, I didn't have deep connection with Spirit, nor with myself. Academic work didn't feed me, and I never did connect with that community on a deep level. I felt lost and alone and desperate.
But discernment as a lived practice entered my life slowly. First it was articulating the concept of the "next right thing" -- the idea that we never need to see more than the next stepping stone. Then it was the experience of getting together with Ms. P which, although many years in the making, went from kiss to throwing over the nuns (her) to her moving in with me in three short weeks. (Yes, we are the poster dykes for the u-haul stereotype.) Then we noticed how quick and easy our move to DC was -- the job, the house, it all fell into place perfectly and suddenly. It was synchronicity in action.
In the last six months, we've been able to be more discerning, more attentive. We spend more time on the cushion, we spend more time journaling, we've been living the questions more often.
And it's discernment that led Ms. P to quit her job even though she doesn't have another one lined up yet. It's discernment that makes me believe that the adoption plan is not where we're being led right now, despite the fact that we were one nearly-completed report and a big check (okay, and some large number of months) away from being parents. It's discernment that brought me to signing up for the life coaching training, and it's discernment that has Ms. P aiming for seminary.
Yet none of this "makes sense" in a way my parents would recognize. Hell, none of it "makes sense" in a way my friends would recognize. I'm struggling with that very thing right now, not because it makes me doubt what we've discerned, but because it feels so fragile and tender that I don't want to have to defend it to people who neither understand nor believe in discernment. I'm living largely out of faith right now, and that's hard to explain to people.
Maybe it doesn't make sense. But it's how I've gotten to all of the very best things in my life. And so I'm taking that leap of faith, I'm trusting in the process, and I'm trying to keep breathing.
It's hard. But no harder than living a life that's not my own.
Comments