Goodbye Puzzles

“There is no escape: understanding a subject means transforming it, lifting it out of a natural habitat and inserting it into a model or a theory or a poetic account of it. But one transformation may be better than another in the sense that it permits or even explains what for the other transformation remains an unsolvable puzzle.”

~Paul Feyerabend

The need to transform myself is so strong that it’s like a undertow pulling me in to a new rhythm, drowning me. This happens all the more when I struggle against the current, resisting with feeble humanness, paddling through fifteen-foot waves with only smooth palms as instruments of survival. Each time a wave bats my shoulders and eddies around my feet, filling my mouth water, my lungs burning with salted spray, I continue to fight, heaving up and missing, no place to kick off. What am I fighting against? Why is the other direction so scary? Why is the same vast body less comforting when I’m dragged and pummeled by it then when I release the tension and float with it toward some distant shore? Or should I turn toward it, as they say, to swim with the current? I must be willing to aim the trusted vessel of my body into the unknown because I’m already well equipped to mutate, born under the constellation of the Archer, having entered the world in a dire battle for life—or so my mother tells me.

Here is the reason for the raging battle: I no longer want mere survival. I’m not looking for an oar or a raft or a boat. I’m searching out dry land, a rock for these high-water, riptide times. This is not a poem or a metaphor. It’s a thirst for fresh water and a firm foothold amongst the living. Will I live?

This time, I’m paddling with the swift motion of the force swelling around me. The surging water is sweeping me away from familiar ground, the old things broken up by a sudden storm. The realization of my own mortality, of the constant corporal dying that must not be met with spiritual or emotional death. This dying is a call to life, shaking me awake to my floundering in the surf, afraid to let loose in the deep or set out for the dry place beyond. This thing in me is asking me to grow, to let go of the small hallowed out place in which I hide, whence I retreat, removed from light.

Who cares? Only I do. Only I.

It’s not enough to suffer with the unhappiness of a life of complacency, staying in an unpleasant situation, not for happiness’ sake, but for the comfort of the familiar. I cling to a job that pillages my soul daily. This is my family of origin all over again. Or so my therapist tells me. Each day I give the best parts of myself, the most vulnerable and the most brilliant. They take it all. These folks have never been as kind to me as my family. They have failed to honor or recognize me in the smallest way, leaving me to waste in isolation, ostracized where I had thought myself at home. So this return to the self, the awakening of the sacred from the extended nightmare, is over. I’m finally ready to break up with my former employer. How funny, strange and good it is to open my hands and let go, surrender the loose bits of sand and some pretty shells with my eyes on the horizon. “Goodbye.”

Walking away, saying ‘no’ to things we’re in the habit of yessing, is never easy. Reality can quickly become insanity like a thousand fragments of truth, none remotely recognizable, yet quite definitely a part of the whole. Who we are eludes defining, evades labels. Searching for the lost parts of myself after deaths, breakups and separations becomes a project of enormous proportion. Shaking my scattered parts, sifting through my past, scanning the oddities, looking for a piece of me I can place in time and connect with: here the edge of a wave, there a shoreline cut at just the right cresting angle to fit my own, I’m inclined to take my time with this one.