Boxes

I stepped a little further out of my box today. Testing what that “freedom” of my life feels like. I drove up the snowy muddy roads to a lake surrounded by mountains. The low lake was frozen and surrounded in reeds, I walked the edge on cloudy ice and then hiked up a mountain scrambling rocks to find a perfect perch in the sunlight on the just over 30 degree day. I sat looking out over the expanse of space, listening to what there was there. Since leaving my husband of nine years in August, I have had to face so many fears by myself, pushing the boundaries of the box I had lived in for the past decade. As my car slipped in 3-4 inch mud and I slowly steered down the hill hoping/praying that I wasn’t going to loose total control but knowing it wasn’t too far away—I had that realization that, this is just how life is, we are really just barely in control, and all we are doing is steering into the slipping turns of life.

I found myself in this precarious driving situation today because of a risk I took to expand my comfort zone, to explore new territory, and I was doing it alone with no one there in the passenger seat to depend on.  And that is how its been for almost exactly three months now, me, yes I have had the support of friends, some very close, but they have their own lives that spin them off into their own directions that they themselves need to turn into and go with—so more often then not its just been me. It felt good to push boundaries, take a risk and come up victorious with a vehicle covered in mud.

I sat by another lake further down the road, which deeper rippled from the slight wind, lapping the rocks. I sat and listened to it as it touched its edges pushing the mud and sand. I tossed flat rocks out across the surface skipping them and then watching them as they fell below the surface leaving only concentric circles expanding in their path. Life is this in way—people, events, experiences they leave behind these ripples as they drop below the surface of our day. But like the lake now forever changed with a rocks new placement so are we from all that passes through our days.

And as I come away from this day of solace I realize I hardly recognize myself anymore, for so long I have been boxed and now free to expand, explore the world I have the amazing opportunity to push out of this box that has grown to small for me and to find my life in a new way.