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It struck her abruptly. An almost physically palpable thud, causing her to stand at attention. She became tensely erect, as if in anticipation for it to hit her again to get her to notice more. She couldn’t relax back to the painfully comfortable being she had become. Surely whatever it was that shook her out of her rut, wanted her to go deeper. But there was no further strike. Things almost seemed normal. But she felt differently. It was the feeling of walking on ice and having broken through a thin spot of it with only one leg. It leaves one with a certain curiosity at what lies beneath the surface of the once free flowing element, now frigidly immobilized. Isn’t that what her life had become? At one point it appeared to be so fluid, exciting undercurrents taking her through unforeseen and unplanned chapters in her life. When exactly did she become frozen in her endeavors? Stiffening into the same persistent pattern. Shutting out change and insistingly clinging to routines. Where indeed was the delineating line between truly living a practice versus just going through the motions? That’s when it sank in. She had just been doing that. Going through the motions of what she had been taught to believe without those beliefs being part of her own truth. What was her truth? It wasn’t for anyone to explain it to her. The only way for her to know was to live it herself. And so instead of waiting for another attention-grabbing sign, she simply turned to face those things that kept her reliving the same routine all those years. Up to now, she had not been open to all the possibilities that could uniquely unfold from any given situation. She had simply gone through each situation with her own anticipation of how things should be, in the way she was taught to believe, without letting it be all that it could be. It wasn’t pleasant at all at first, to stay with the discomfort of coming to terms that her life was a quasi-truth. Instead of just one leg breaking through that ice, it felt like her face getting dunked in icy water. Gasping for breath, as she had to keep coming up for air, she felt like she was drowning as layers and layers of who she believed herself to be stripped off. Some of those layers made her cringe in her acute awareness of how haughtily pretentious parts of her life had been. But as more and more of her natural state of being was revealed, she became more forgiving of herself. Allowing her to tolerate the process of layers coming off, and being put on, as different circumstances still demanded the existence of particular layers. She figured that she would sooner or later leave all layers behind when her time would come to die. ~•~ a beautiful milieu