Stark-raving joyful

“Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me.”
- Baal Shem Tov

Recently I found a label sewn into the lining of my being. It’s a scrap of narrative that’s been buried way deep down in there, so thin and worn that I hardly felt it as separate from me. It’s kept me from telling the truth, or doing most things that have felt right to me.

The label reads: “Naïve.”

Don’t be naïve. That’s not the Real World. These lines, this ‘truth,’ fed to me like food. From every direction. I was naïve for dreaming the way I dreamt, seeing what I saw, hoping for what I did. Naïve for believing.

I couldn’t get with the program, not ever. I couldn’t - physically couldn’t - buckle down, work hard, play harder, strive toward a singular vision, trade pain for gold.

I could never grok the rules of that game, let alone play it.

Still, I had to fit in somehow. So I stopped acting naïve. Stopped dreaming the way I dreamt. Stopped saying what I saw. I shifted into neutral, floated on auto pilot. Followed breadcrumbs and stars. Stayed afloat, stayed alive. Did what I could to numb the pain.

Again and again I stumbled, by ‘chance,’ into so much good fortune. Watched over, kept from harm.

I never once credited anything like guidance or belief, divinity or destiny. Never once did I acknowledge that there was part of me that had kept dreaming this whole time. I just passed it off as random luck, of which I was the undeserving recipient.

Hard to feel the joy of anything, dismissing it the way I did for so long. Ya know?

———

The other day I declared to some friends that I was once again taking the ‘batshit crazy’ action of deserting my life for another three weeks to go walk another stretch of the Camino de Santiago, yet again trudging contentedly across half a country whose language I barely speak, whose terrain at times has taken everything I have, whose magic is undeniable.

This time I’m walking to a family wedding in Santiago - yup, that Santiago, where the Camino culminates. The bride is a niece in my recently found birth family, with whom I united with them the same year I walked my first Camino. The groom was born and raised in Santiago.

This family who has been mine since long before I knew them, gathering to celebrate in the place that began calling to me in those blind years. These two central, foundational, aspects of life that have me feel more like me are now co-occurring in the space of a few weeks.

How … how is this not a miracle?

This has helped snapped me out of the ‘random luck’ narrative. I can no longer deny that my life has floated along some current that has been pulling me in the direction of incredible shit like this all along.

The only thing that’s ever kept me from being in constant awe is the doubt that any of it is real. The assumption I am being naïve again, that I’m somehow shirking my responsibility as a human. That I have earned none of this.

The doubt, always poised to siphon the joy.

Is it batshit crazy to spend the time and money I am on this journey, when my living is so uncertain? Absolutely. I ‘should,’ at this point, be looking for jobs, or trying harder to grow my business, pushing harder, revving up ambition, doing what it takes.

But I know that would leave me a graying husk of resignation, and life wouldn’t be worth anything to me then. Making the naïve choice makes me feel alive.

———

So I suppose I’m reclaiming, re-fashioning ‘naïve.’ Taking the flaccid, disempowered thread of that word and braiding it into a kind of dream catcher.

I’m vowing to participate now, fully and without regret, not in the Real World™, but in the world that is real to me. One in which I say yes to every miraculous window that opens and invites me to walk through it.

Yet again, I walk with the willingness to let the outdated parts of me dissolve fully - while fully aware that this could be most of me. Aware that, while historically I have returned as a recognizable and usually better version of myself, I am asking Life to re-design me as a better vessel to do its bidding, carry its love.

Naïve? Maybe. I just know that life answers me most clearly when I’m free to dream the way I dream. To liquify and reform regularly, and trust that whatever I emerge as will help me live better in - and for - this beautiful, tumultuous world.

May we all find ways to love better, love more.

See you on the other side.