Rick, my life coach, says I am running
away. He says I am running from my fears. He doesn’t think I ought to go. He
says that part of our life’s purpose is to learn about ourselves. He says that
if I go away too often then one time when I come back there will be nothing
left here. I guess he doesn’t realize how little I have here now. I feel I
ought to be able to make a life for myself here, but, for whatever reason, I am
not. What I have is not enough. I could perhaps, like, if I were someone else
maybe, succeed. But me, here, now… I am not succeeding. I am not thriving. I am
barely surviving. It scares me. It is not what I want, what anyone would want.
It is not healthy on several different levels. But, as though depressed, which
I currently claim not to be, I seem unable to ‘snap out of it’. I am definitely
not learning anything useful here/now about myself. Rick says that my running
away is a drug, a crutch, an addiction. We sit and talk for hours, literally,
but he doesn’t realize, perhaps, how sick I am.
I have hot and sour soup with Geoff. He
starts off by asking about work. Well, a job was posted at MCS for the coming
semester but I didn’t even get an interview. (Seriously?) I feel kicked in the
teeth. He asks about the cottage by the river that I am first on the waiting list to
move into. The list has just been scrapped. It is all a mess.
So I am
boxing up my stuff, again. I will be moving out, again. But not moving into
anywhere. Given my age and culture this intrinsic instability is trying. How
can I be 50 and of no fixed address?
I will go. I have run away before. More
than once. Quit my job. Left my lover. Gone. Overnight almost. But this is the
first time I will have left without a destination in mind.
Rick thinks
I should stay. ‘The hardest thing to do is stay,’ he says. ‘But,’ I ask, ‘just
because it is the hardest thing does that make it the right thing?’ (I have no
self-esteem. I have so little, in fact, that I am amazed I even exist. How can
it be that I have not been completely transformed to dust and drifted away insubstantial
and unnoticed? I am a ghost.) ‘You are a wonderful person,’ Rick tells me, ‘You
have great qualities.’ But then we laugh because we both know I am currently incapable
of believing a word of this. It would be easy to stay. I could carry on, doing
nothing, keep the status quo going until I die. (A wee bit of me is hoping to
find something astonishing when I go, a person who can excel at life.) To be
fair to Rick I think that what he means when he says staying he means staying
and working on things, bettering them, as opposed to staying and continuing on
on the same fruitless path… but that, I firmly believe, is simply beyond my
current capabilities. I don’t know how to express my gratitude for the gift of
time that he has given me.
A sprinkling
of snow is glittering in gentle sunlight as I head to the river and the hills
across the ice are visible yet muted, like a watercolour painting. The world is
three lazy strips of grey, purple and white, so beautiful my heart aches. How could
I possibly want to leave this place?
‘You don’t really want to run away,’ Rick
states. ‘Yes,’ I contradict him, emphatically, ‘Yes.
I do.’
