Falling into the World

Happy New Year!! It always takes a little getting used to when the year changes. As I am sure is the case for many of you, I tend to look both back and forward at this transitional time.

Last week as I was thinking ahead to what this year will likely bring and it was both very exciting and daunting. Both of my children are scheduled to graduate this year (15 hours apart in two different states but that’s a story for a different time), one from college and one from high school. This signifies a real shift in my day to day and a “falling into” that next stage of life. This reality brings up a large swath of different emotions from excitement to fear to sadness to joy. At moments it is completely impossible to conceive of and at others I am truly excited for this next chapter. I shared a reading this past week with students that explains this from the perspective of a chick being born. 

The Chick Being Born, Mark Nepo

Every crack is also an opening.

     When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. 
      Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. It’s sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment– growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking– the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn’t die, but falls into the world. 
     The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we have relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is. 
     Yet the chick offers us the wisdom that the way to be born while still alive is to eat our own shell. When faced with great change– in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling– we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us.

We can all relate to moments when the changes are so overwhelming and the waves of intense emotions overtake us so much that we literally fell like we may not survive. The opportunity we have both on and off the mat is the meet this intensity with the understanding that it is temporary. What feels unimaginable becomes possible, what feels out of our reach becomes attainable and what it is time to let go of both stays with us and frees us.