Do you recognise the signs?
Detail from an original painting
I’ve been thinking back to a time when I was refusing myself changes that my soul was crying out for, ignoring the signs until they forced themselves on to my attention.
I was being very successful in a demanding job that I no longer loved. It used up my best energy on the mundane and the logical, so that the poetic in my life was being neglected. By ‘poetic’, I mean the part of life spent with art or music or writing or bird-watching or food, or any kind of deep and felt experiencing of some aspect of being in this amazing world. For me, that was painting – looking at it and doing it and exploring it. Painting wanted more of my best time and energy, and the way I was working inhibited that.
Here are the kind of signs to be aware of…
Your body keeps telling you something is missing, and if you don’t listen, it keeps telling you until you do. My body nags me through my sinuses. Other bodies may communicate through gut problems or tiredness. I remember forcing myself to get up and drive to work, with a parental voice in my head chiding me for making a fuss about ‘just a cold’. At some point on the motorway, I felt so wretched that tears started rolling down my cheeks. Only then did I take notice. I turned around at the next junction, went home to bed and got signed off sick for a week. And I have to report that all the things I was working so hard to keep going did not collapse.
Your longings leak out. I was longing to explore painting but had made decisions that forced me to spend my time and energy in committee meetings and strategy groups. My agenda papers would come out of meetings covered in ‘doodles’. Nowadays those would be in sketchbooks.
Your longings sneak in as former loves no longer enthrall. I would be at conferences in my subject area. Where once I had sat listening hard and taking notes, now my attention wandered. I’d find myself creeping out to the nearest art gallery. There, in high white spaces, with colour and creativity all around I felt I could breathe again.
Your longings will find strange ways to demand your attention. I came to recognise a night-time dream that still recurs if I spend too long without painting. The dream centres around a baby, very small, and often slippery to hold, or disappearing inside a blanket. The feeling of needing to keep hold of this tiny precious thing, the desperation to not let it slip away is quite distressing. It’s always a signal from my subconscious that I need to make time for painting.
We start to disrupt our own lives in small ways – we forget appointments, drop cups, miss bills that need paying.
Alongside the signs that something is out of balance come the hints about what really matters, the moments of joy. I remember being snowed in for a whole week. And the joy of waking up with a whole day ahead, empty and everything possible, time to write, to paint, to think and be myself.
These moments of passing bliss, these pointers to a fuller life, are to be treasured and collected. Capture them in some way (as photos or in writing) and look carefully at your collection of hints. Notice what it is telling you.
Who knows where it will lead…
If you are reading this blog post and recognise some of the signs that you long for a change in your life, I want to tell you that it will be ok. It probably won’t be how you imagine. But it will be change. And the signs suggest that, for you, as for me, change is as necessary as breathing, as necessary as fresh air and cool water.
I wrote the course Catching the Whispers for people who are being prodded and prompted by their inner longings in ways like this, for more art or more music or more poetry or more writing or.... whose lives are telling them in several different ways that all is not right, that changes are needed to revitalize the poetic dimensions of life. The course is designed to support and accompany you in exploring what your change might look like and how you might start to bring it gently into your life. We’re starting in a few days. If it feels right, I’d love you to join us.