A Bit Lost..

..but the lawn is nice.

An owlet falls down from her nest in her sleep in one of our children’s books. She finds herself in a new world, the world down on the ground. She is not overly scared, just terribly lost.

For years, I felt like I was onboard a speeding train, rushing through a landscape full of people, places and events that I barely acknowledged but only vaguely noticed as a blur through the window. Even if I leaned out to try to get closer, to hear a converstaion better, or to smell or taste the ambiance, my train didn’t have time to stop. It kept rushing fast towards something, somewhere unknown. The train I was onboard had no destination, it’s only incentive was to move faster and to deny the landscape around me, which was my life.

I’m not sure how I got off and landed on a flower lawn. Did I fall off? Did someone push me? Or did I jump? As I looked up in my confusion I could see that the train had rushed on without me.

Like the owlet, I wasn’t really scared, just lost.

Months have passed, and now not only I got off the train, everyone did! The trains didn’t rush on, they all stopped and everyone got off. We’re all sitting on our little patches of lawn (typically inside our houses) and look around at our little landscapes surrounding us. Our little universes. Our lives.

The owlet in the story eventually finds her way back up in her nest having made some new friends down on the ground. But as a few trains in my reality are slowly starting to move again, I have little intention of getting back on mine. It was never mine, my nest. And my little lawn is becoming a rather nice place to be. The here and now is pleasant. But when looking up from that daydreaming patch, the question waiting around every corner is inevitable: What’s next?

The next hour, the next month, the next year?

It seems such a great opportunity to make a radical change, get out of that unhealthy lifestyle, make a difference to others and the planet, enjoy being here, being human. But falling back to the old patterns, the old job (if it still exists), earn money, get on with life, is the so much easier option. Breaking patterns is hard. Leaping into the unknown is scary.