Embracing the Unexpected

It’s taken near three years since leaving a thirty-five year career to think I may have just begun to settle into my ‘self’.   While settling in to something or someone I’ve not always been quite clear about, it remains that the best parts of my life, the parts new and some old revisited, are often the most unexpected.  It would seem the most definitive plans I had, have failed to achieve anything more than the most general paths I’ve taken.  Many expectations left broken in defeat and left with questions why.

As I find myself sitting on my patio staring over the beach, listening to the waves crash and withdraw on the rocks below the cliff in front of me, writing in the warmth of an Algarvian autumn sun, and having woke and risen with it a bit earlier, I am in love.  A love I’ve come to expect, but to the extent of which I appreciate I can only admit it as being unexpected. I may be able to tell you how I got here.  I cannot tell you what my plan was to get me here.

Each morning, a rising sun brings love - the great sense of being grateful for the love in my life.  My wife, my sons, my family, my friends…and the sun.  And the ocean and the wind and…

I guess it was curiosity that brought me here.  To this moment.  This place.  I may have had a picture in my head at some point earlier in my life, but no path or plan for it.  Unless expecting the unexpected is a plan.  That itself being new for me.

There’s less and less doubt and more and more evidence of how wu-Wei may be present in my life, and may be achieved.  In my life anyway.  Wu-wei, the Tao Te Ching reference to ‘flow’ or ‘the way’ (or both), is about opening oneself to possibilities by allowing a clear mind and a warm heart to make way for a liberated soul to present itself.  Maybe attach itself to something our soul belongs a part of.  Something much greater.  Free of presumption.  A part of nature as opposed to an opposition to it.

I don’t want to take anything for granted.  Yet, some parts of this moment, this place, have so much more value than others.  For me, the possessions mean so much less than the relationships.  Relationships with people, history, nature;  the land, wind, ocean and sun.

In some way, I feel the natural part - a relationship with nature is the part of my life that may have been most dormant behind the clouds and fog of my mind.

For as I sit in the Algarvian sunlight and an illuminating path stretches from the horizon widening as it shines back to touch my heart and awake my soul, what love is, is affirmed.

 

And though now I am here “unexpectedly” I feel nothing more than I have simply remembered what I naturally already know.  That which was dormant…awakened.

Maybe what may appear ‘unexpected’ should be viewed differently.  Perhaps the unexpected - or what we experience as such - is simply our soul revealing itself.

Were I to expect nothing and dare to dream and walk in that direction, should I, if nothing else, expect to at least head in the direction of the sun.  Is the sun always a soul-touching protagonist in realizing dreams?  Or a metaphor for the light at the end of a proverbial tunnel?

For isn’t the sun quite like my soul?  Dormant at times behind the clouds and the fog.  There, but not.  And what could feel better than our soul unfiltered and untethered save for its illuminated path to the sun?

It strikes me as more likely that our mind’s many expectations are what are mis-aligned to begin with.  And our soul’s single expectation…to love…is not.  I now expect my soul and sun to be connected, and leave room for the unexpected found in my silent curiosity of the re-connection with love illuminated by each day’s new sun.  For even if I wake to clouds or fog, I may expect to know it is still very much there.  As is my stirring souls though still dormant it may be some times.