Through the Way in Which You Are Not

I spent a wonderful evening with my girlfriends this past Thursday night while my husband was out with the guys. We don't usually have a plan when we get together. We just get together and see what happens. Sometimes we'll watch television shows or makeup tutorials on youtube, or sometimes we'll spend hours talking, or sometimes we'll just sit around and not do much of anything, even talking. But most of the time there is some kind of talking, no matter what else is going on.

This time it was nothing but talking. About three hours of talking. When we were done, we commented on how we didn't even get around to watching a tv show like we had considered doing, but how we didn't need to, because sometimes just talking is way better. And it was so refreshing, because it wasn't just any talking - not just talking about funny stories or random things that happened (although there was some of that too), but it was the figuring-out-the-world and the people in it kind of talking that leaves you feeling like you grew up just a little bit more in the process.

We talked about relationships and people and purpose and the ebbs and flows of life. Thinking back, I realize we talked about change, even though not directly. I mean change was a common denominator in all of our topics. Most of the time we think we don't like change, but then most of the time we do. And both at the same time. We don't like how our relationship with different people change, but in other cases we do. Or we want something to change, but the process of it changing is painful or cumbersome or inconvenient because it requires adjustment, and adjustment requires work. Requires change. The change we want requires the change we don't want.

I don't normally feel so philosophical on a Saturday morning (or afternoon), but something about a still and quiet house (other plans took Levi out of the house long before I woke up today) at the end of a fast and busy week makes me sit back and observe life as though from a distance. I even picked up T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which is something you don't do unless time and a contemplative state of mind are on your side. I started from the beginning and just kept reading and reading, as though my mind and soul had not absorbed rich, mysterious poetry in a long time. Because I hadn't. The standard 9-to-5 doesn't easily include mysterious poetry. But this Saturday does.

When I came upon this portion of Eliot's writing, I kept going back to read and re-read it, because every time I did, I understood a little bit more of it. And it reminded me of Thursday night's reflective exchanges.

                               In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are

         not,

    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

    You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

    You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

                                   -T.S. Eliot, East Coker III

The change we want requires the change we don't want. Ignorance and dispossession and uncertainty is involved in arriving at where we want to be, wherever that is, whether in our careers, relationships, personal or spiritual lives, or anywhere else. But wherever it is, we can only get there by where we are not, and that means change. And ultimately, we will continue through our lives, through dispossession and uncertainty and change until we reach the End, where we will find that all along, we were only prefacing the Beginning.