Dear LO,
I've often wondered how many of you have felt loneliness or despair. Or
are feeling it. Wondering because I have. Because I do now.
I know such feelings are part of living and produce growth as they are
endured. And I think that it's normal to not readily admit such feelings
-- for many reasons. Over the last few years a couple special friendships
ceased to exist in the familiar way and the loss was heavy for over a
year.
My mother is becoming one of my children and I feel more mortal every
day.
September 11th buried horrible images deep inside that are even now just
beginning to come into play in bothersome ways.
Yet, I have much to be thankful for, and if I could wave some magic wand
and change my life, I wouldn't.
Beside the fact that you are a special group to me, I have wondered if any
of you have felt this way because of the paths you have chosen in being
lights and examples for change.
When I first woke up and became excited about reclaiming my personal and
organizational life -- I felt like I had literally been reborn -- a
stranger in a new world -- learning to walk and talk all over again. New
ways. New friends. New opportunities. New passions. And I truly
believe I changed. Almost overnight in comparison to the span of my life.
Now, 8-9 years downstream from the beginning of the change, I feel like I
have lost some of it. Not the beliefs. Not the change. Not the way I
think and act. Not the way I try to treat others. But I seem to have
lost -- at least for now -- the happiness that came at first. Not the
beautiful memory of it. But the happiness. I often feel sad. Sometimes
alone. Depressed for seemingly no good reason. Maybe it's as though the
first feelings were an overshoot and now this is the undershoot stage
before I settle out at some semblance of levelness. Maybe this is the
feeling -- long delayed -- that comes with the death of who I once was.
Maybe it's worse when you remake yourself for the first time at age 48,
instead of constantly remaking yourself as you go along. Many of the
people I befriended in the initial surge were not really friends -- those
relationships did not endure -- and that's saddening. Maybe choosing a
path that sets you apart from the mainstream is, by nature of choice, a
lonely path. I don't know.
But I wait to see what I'm learning and trust that I'm going to like where
I find myself. But it is lonely at times. It can make you feel desperate
-- even if only a little bit. This LO community helps more than you might
know. So I've wondered -- do any of you ever have such feelings from time
to time?
Thanks for listening. Below is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters
To A Young Poet." It strengthens me.
John Dicus
===== Begin Quote ====
You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that
even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please,
consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through
the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you
have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while
you were sad?
Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among
people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially
and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break
out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are
unlived, spurned lost life of which one may die.
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet
a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure
our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the
moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our
feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a
stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of
it and is silent.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we
find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living.
Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self;
because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away
because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain
standing. For this reason the sadness, too, passes: the new thing in us,
the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost
chamber and is not even there any more -- is already in our blood. And we
do not learn what it was.
We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we
have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We
cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs
indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform
itself in us long before it happens.
And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is
sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our
future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and
fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.
The more still, more patient, and more open we are when we are sad, so
much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us,
so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our
destiny, and when on some later day it 'happens' (that is, steps forth out
of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it.
And that is necessary. It is necessary -- and toward this our development
will move gradually -- that nothing strange should befall us, but only
that which has long belonged to us.
We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion, we will
also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth
from within people, not from without into then. Only because so many have
not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while
they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out
of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered fright, they
thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear
never before to have found anything like it in themselves.
As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even
yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands
firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space. How should it not be
difficult for us?
Rainer Maria Rilke
==== End Quote =====
--John Dicus | CornerStone Consulting Associates - Leadership - Systems Thinking - Teamwork - Open Space - Electric Maze - 2761 Stiegler Road, Valley City, OH 44280 800-773-8017 | 330-725-2728 (2729 fax) mailto:jdicus@ourfuture.com | http://www.ourfuture.com
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.