On: Leavings

On:  Leavings

Colleen Rogers

In a couple of weeks, I am leaving something behind.  On reflection, I know that my choice to go is intellectually correct, but emotionally there is this murkiness, and I withstand an awkward sensation of brave-gulping over a precipice leap.  Like most such decisions for change, "clarity'" is not marked decidedly like Stonehenge.  There are people I am leaving behind that I am fond of, and quirks in the place's pace that I will remember as endearing.  

I wonder why the forks in our roads, even when they have definite directional signs, still trigger a queasy period of adjustment and discomfort.  

 
Every one of these necessitated landline switches...

--it's not the right person for me

--it's not my best fit professionally

--it's not where I want to be living

...is packaged with re-adjustment clocks and periods of self-doubt.  Even after I have made a clear commitment, circled my wagons, and got out of Dodge, I have paid a timeshare of emotional re-organization...

...it is only then that I think of my Red-Headed Boy.

Many years ago, lunar lifetimes past, I fell in love with a Red Headed Boy.  I met him at a wedding reception, and took the setting as a sign of our fated romantic destiny.  We were together for an illustrious and infamous couple of years.  I held no cards toward our love's outcome, and lost every hand paddling to commitment.  Pruned and waterlogged after hanging onto the life raft of the relationship, I finally let go and drifted to shore alone.  I quietly sunbathed, read, and "worked on myself", retreating to an island of self-preservation.  It was then that I met my husband, and (without the foretold melodramatic references) I found an unyielding romance that has shored my world.  And so...

If it had not been for a "leaving", there would have been no "finding"...without the scary cliffs from which we each soar, there would be no elevated life adventures.  It is our leavings, these choices, that shove us toward richly spirited lives.  Our sense of controlling selections may not be genuine in the universe's standards, but our chance-takings fit the quests we need for our determined joy.  Finally, with my own settled contentment, I hope that the Red Headed Boy is happy with his "leaving" as well.