When you’ve stepped off the cliff, not knowing yet somehow trusting how something new would unfold. It has happened a number of times in your life, and strangely, curiously, you have always been caught and held. The leaps into the unknown have been OK. You have come to trust the taking of risk, because even when the risk immediately had unexpected experiences, long-term the leaps have always offered something new and vital. In ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined at the time before the leap. Sometimes knocked around on the way down, it turned out that there wasn’t any “down,” in the way most people thought. It was more a “through” than a “down.” And there is a landing, in an initially strange land, for sure. You look around and little is familiar, perhaps other than the human condition(s). What people do, everywhere and everywhen. You go on out to meet who shows up, as you have shown up. Daring greatly.
Now that you’re here, what’s next? You have no idea, but to take each moment as it comes- thoughtfully, with hopefully as many wits as you can muster, and kindly in this new place. Who would have thought you would show up here? In what seems to be someone else’s movie, but turns out to be your show. Some of your friends, back there, got together before you stepped away, to celebrate knowing you- How many of them have chosen to face their own life-changing risks? You see some in the air, right along with you. Its hard to tell if anyone will land in a similar place.
Be patient, your new family says. Take your time, if you have that luxury, in this new place to get acclimated. Which will take a few weeks. Or months. And perhaps the most important thing is to realize that the place you left has already changed from what you knew. So if you thought to go back there, and dreamed about it, it has already changed beyond what you knew. The familiar unfamiliar. The root of familiar is family. With family, in a curious punning way, nothing is un-familiar.
Who are these people, whose group you have shown up into, from that leap off the cliff not so long ago? Maybe it takes decades to show up here- and you were only a story that people told on holiday gatherings. Here you are, inhabiting this story, realizing and materializing in this place that was previously occupied by a character.
And you can absolutely trust, that there will be yet another leap, willing or unwilling, off another cliff.