Re-shuffling My Deck

Being a student at USM is unsettling. I'm starting to really wonder who I am and what I'm about. Some things that I was so sure about - like my job - are changing. It's like walking on shifting sand. It looks solid, but then it moves or you step and it slides under your foot or the wind blows and you find yourself lost. It's like that funky feeling of walking on land after living on a boat for several days - you know the ground is solid but it feels like it's swimming under your feet.

I've never been comfortable with the unknown. Goal-oriented to a fault, I'm lost without something to be working toward. But I can live in the future indefinitely - I'm fine with delayed gratification as long as I know something's coming, that I'm going somewhere. And as long as I know my goal, then I know that the payoff is coming. There have only been two times in my life when I didn't have a goal: from birth to age 6 (when I first saw Jacques Cousteau on tv and decided to be a marine biologist) and now. I have no practice at this. I have no experience living this way. I feel ungrounded, unsettled. I have clearly-defined short-term and long-term goals, but I'm starting to question them.

I look at my deepest-held goals, the goals that brought me to USM, and slowly I begin to realize that I'm exactly where I need to be. I'm doing everything I need to do. I'm not missing anything. I am full. I am complete in this moment. One day, my intuition chimes in that this period will only last until June. Can I hang with this feeling for six months?! Against all odds and all past experience, I surrender to being where I am. I decide to relax and enjoy it. Suddenly, it feels like an adventure. Where will I go? Where will these six months take me? I have no idea. But, intuitively, I feel the potential energy waiting for me on the other side of June. I feel like Tony in West Side Story. Something's coming, don't know what it is but it is gonna be great. The air is humming...but not for a few months yet.

When friends ask me about USM, I get a little evasive, a little vague. Yes, it's amazing, but no, I have no idea where it's taking me. What will I do after I finish? Who knows?! Through many conversations that all seem to be the same conversation but with different people, I notice that I am still me, I have all my same parts. I still love dolphins. I still love teaching. I still love writing, and being a mom, and helping people, and being outside, and running on trails along the creek. It's just that I feel like my parts are re-arranging. I feel like a deck of cards, I say to my friends, that is being re-shuffled and I don't know how all the parts are going to fit together in the end. What order will the cards be in? I don't know. But I know that each card is a part of me. I'm not losing anything, I'm just re-arranging.

Going to USM is like surrendering my deck of cards to the great cosmic dealer. Hands of light and love envelope me and move individual cards around. The process takes time - I imagine these divine hands enjoying the process like my grandmother loved to do before a good game of gin rummy, fanning the cards, gracefully folding them back into each other, shuffling again, fanning in a different pattern, folding and shuffling yet again.

And so this is where I am living right now, in the middle of re-shuffling my deck.