The Dying Year: Lost is Found

What I Intended

I attempted to work in a multitude of fields, none of which was entirely successful. Whether I was suited for any seems irrelevant now. What stands out is that each occupation I chose had within it, the possibility of genuine self discovery. Each job I courted required a decision to either follow a proven path toward achievement, or risking your own. I needed to test what I believed about myself against what my family needed me to believe.

I made attempts to become a photographer, an actor, a landscaper, and a teacher. Despite being told I had a genuine talent in each, I've been denied all of them.

Whenever upward movement began in any of them, something else interrupted it. My life would present a choice between what I was doing, and something I'd never considered. I chose the thing I'd never considered every time. When I look back I see a pattern. The things that appeared gave me a better chance to discover what I needed to discover. They gave me a better chance at healing.

Long Way To Get Where I Started

When I was 24 I had a stroke. A clot formed on a then, undisclosed, "mitral valve pro laps", and was thrown into my bloodstream before getting lodged in my brain. I lost the peripheral vision on the left hemisphere of both eyes, and a small degree of sensation on the entire left side of my body. The part of my brain where the clot lodged, died.

I was in the hospital for weeks, and had to learn to walk again. Two significant things happened while I was there. The first came in the form of an anecdote. It's the only evidence I have that my father cared about me. A sibling told me he broke down in tears, and said he kept saying he'd "give anything to take my place”. He died in an alcohol related car accident less than a year later.

The second was an introduction to what became my spiritual vocation. A friend visited, and asked if I’d like a job with the landscape company where he was a foreman. He said he thought the physical activity would help my recovery. I said yes.

Landscaping taught me what it meant to be an artist more than any artistic endeavor I'd tried. It taught me process. It showed me how to remove myself from a creation, so I could steward it. I understood that anything is 'art', even an individual life. It showed me I could be an artist without having a specific medium to work in.

My life has been a series of aiming at one thing and hitting another. Everything I hoped to learn about myself, and my relation to the world, has been granted. Just never how I thought.

My life recently revealed a pattern that’s guided it. The first cycle in the pattern appeared when I was a boy taking those beatings, and walking through woods. I'm nearing the end of the most recent one now. The 'cycles' that make up the pattern take anywhere from 4 to 6 years to play out. I can identify 6 of them in my lifetime. Each cycle is made up of the following phases, and each cycle follows the same order. It goes like this:

1. It starts with a dominant, closely held belief about myself or the world, and a decision to challenge that belief as true, or false, by embarking on a course of action.

2. After a decision has been made, and action has begun, there's a collapse, or fall from grace, that leaves no alternative but to change course.

3. When the need for a new course has been established, something happens that presents a coincidental alternative that, for some specific reason in my life, can't be rejected.

4. The 'alternative' is always accompanied by a specific identity, or persona, required for its successful execution. That identity is never mine. It’s usually a persona I’d judged, or considered beneath me, at some point in my life. I’m always required to discard parts of the one I'm wearing, and repair it with parts from the new one.

5. The revelation at the end of each cycle is always similar without being exactly the same, and it always results in a deepening of what I believed about myself, and who I am at my core. It confirms the instincts I had about my innate talents, and corrects another. My original belief that we hone our gifts by employing them for personal gain is dismantled by the truth. The gifts in each of us blossom to their fullest, and enact their design, when employ them, with genuine interest, toward the elevating, or assistance of, someone else.

I'm certain there are people who get the message their first time through a cycle. I'm certain I've had 6 because I didn't.

I'm wondering if I was unable to see my life past the age of 52 because I learned to accept, and embrace, my place in the world at age 51.