Читать книгу How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 11

One night soon after I began the process of making these dramatic changes, I had a very powerful and vivid dream. In this dream, I was using a large, heavy shovel to dig a deep hole in the middle of a beautifully landscaped garden. The garden was filled with lovely, cheerful flowers, perfectly planted in orderly designs, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I just kept vigorously digging away, dirt flying everywhere, ripping up the flowers with each thrust of my shovel, crushing the delicate petals under piles of stones and debris.

At this point in the dream, a woman came along, and when she saw me digging, she became very upset.

“What are you doing?” she yelled. “You’re destroying the garden. It was perfect. Now you’ve ruined it. What’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”

I turned to the woman and calmly answered: “I’m digging deep for wisdom.” Then I went back to my digging.

The next morning when I woke up and remembered the dream, I realized what an important message it contained from my inner self to me. The garden represented the life I’d known that had looked perfect on the outside, orderly and attractive in every way. There I was digging an enormous hole right in the middle of all that beauty, uprooting the plants and flowers, throwing dirt on top of what had once been so carefully designed and cultivated. This was just what I’d been doing in my waking world—questioning every aspect of my life; uprooting old beliefs, goals and ideas I’d never had the courage to challenge; making some radical changes.

Who was the woman screaming at me? One interpretation was that she represented many people in my life who disapproved of the intense transformational process I was undergoing. To them, I was just making a mess. They preferred the orderly version of Barbara and Barbara’s life, the one they recognized and understood. Many people who worked for me or with me had been watching in thinly veiled horror as I chose to do less and less. Some were frightened about what would happen to them if I made too many changes. Would they lose their jobs? Some were angry as I downsized my life—would they miss out on opportunities or income because I was no longer willing to overextend myself or to do things that weren’t fulfilling to me? Others, including several friends, were threatened by my very act of questioning, afraid that somehow it would rub off on them, and they would suddenly find themselves wildly digging up their own orderly gardens.

Of course, I knew the deeper meaning of the woman screaming at me: she was a piece of my own self, horribly alarmed at my process of radical questioning that was turning my life upside down. “What are you doing?” that part of Barbara was yelling at me. “You’re destroying everything you worked so hard to build. It was perfect. Now you’re ruining it. Why are you doing this?”

Why was I doing this? How did I get here with a shovel in my hand, unearthing all the goals and dreams I’d spent so much time planting and protecting? It was a good question with no simple answer. I was reexamining everything because events I couldn’t have predicted were forcing me to travel down roads for which I had no map. I was searching for clarity, for revelation, called by something I could not yet define, something compelling me to reassess everything about myself and my life. I was digging because somehow I knew it was time to dig.

Did I know where all of this was leading? No, and that was indeed terrifying. I had never liked proceeding without a carefully structured plan, and to do so in my late forties felt foolhardy and even dangerous. But my illuminating dream had reminded me that although I didn’t know where I would end up, I did know what I was doing—I was digging deep for wisdom, allowing the process of questioning and contemplation to penetrate me to my very core, so I could emerge transformed and more in touch with my true self than ever before.