Unfolding.
Only just a few minutes ago, I started to truly understand the term “unfolding” in the context of how life plays out.
I’m working on being patient and not controlling things. I can understand the concept of letting things play out, but I never really know how to balance that with choices and action. I spent a lot of my life bopping around in the breeze just accepting things as they happened. Which was great, in a way… but I never took accountability for anything. Rarely, anyway. I never made things happen by DOING things. Someone always had to convince me to do something or I followed someone else… but I’m taking my life back now. But trying to be content with the time and space it takes. To unfold.
My husband and I had a difficult conversation last night. I was able to successfully observe my knee-jerk emotions during particularly challenging moments and choose my responses. I stayed calm and didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t speak angry words, I spoke the words that felt true. The words represented how I saw the situations and what I actually thought. I owe that to myself, but I owe that to him. His emotions are real, and he should express them. I haven’t been able to interact with him in this way until recently. I’ve been working on it. Reading things, going to therapy, and I’m invested and interested and committed to untangling my messes and living a more authentic and loving life.
He and I are in different spots in our journies… but I’m learning to accept that also. As for the unfolding… in order to achieve my goals, I need to continue to learn things. Part of my vision involves feeling grounded and comfortable and open to whatever lifey things occur. If I can’t speak my truth to my husband in a respectful way and prioritize this relationship and communication like this, I can not do the next thing on the journey. I need to walk forward. That’s what I’m doing. Like a paper that’s folded a hundred times… it’s like how we are when we’re all engrossed in ego and life experience. We keep folding ourselves into smaller and smaller versions of ourselves, and the truth is there because it exists on that paper, but it’s buried in so many folds. We hide from others, but we hide from ourselves.
Every time you make the conscious decision to look at these behaviors with a lovingly critical eye and choose to step out of patterns that aren’t serving you, you successfully unfold one layer. Where you’re looking to go is already in you… it’s just on a different level. You don’t know how many times you’ve folded that paper. The work is to unfold it one bit at a time, and have the faith that eventually, you’ll reach the center. If you treat yourself and congratulate yourself for each unfolding, you learn to love the process. It’s not about reaching a destination though.
We never know the true destination. There are milestones, and it’s fun to reach those… but the unfolding is part of the human condition. We get in our own way… We have such potential and such power but no idea how to use it. We have to first mess it up a bunch of times, it seems… then we start to figure out what works and doesn’t work… then we start to see where we went wrong and course-correct. We thought we knew this or that… because what we were doing worked for a while… until it stopped working. It takes us a while sometimes to realize what we’ve learned to do and that how we’ve learned to behave isn’t working anymore. And then it’s time to unfold and see what happens. Maybe if we understand our own paper well enough, we can fold it in all the different ways that allow us to fly.
