The Questions That Find Us

When we returned from an extended family trip, our new townhouse still didn't feel like home. Suitcases stood where we had dropped them. Boxes from the move still filled the rooms we had not unpacked, part of the bathroom was under construction, and every doorway reminded me that we were still living in the middle of becoming settled.

I felt much the same way. The final days of the trip had been difficult, and Kamil and I had fallen into another argument about expectations during our journey home. The conversation eventually ended, but the feeling came back with me, the way we sometimes carry things that have not yet found a place to belong.

A few days later, I found myself standing in my closet. I don't remember why I had walked in there. I only remember reaching a point where pretending I was okay required more energy than telling the truth. For weeks, one question had followed me everywhere.

Why am I angry all the time?

My forty-seven-year-old "11 lines" between my eyebrows had settled into a full frown. The funny thing about your own face is that you rarely get to see it. Unless you're standing in front of a mirror, you experience it through the expressions of the people looking back at you. That's how I knew something had changed. The people I loved had started walking on eggshells around me. Sometimes all it took was a glance, an unexpected change in plans, or a misunderstanding. By the time I recognized what had happened, my nervous system had already reacted.

Standing there among clothes that still hadn't found their place in our new home, I reached for my phone and wrote to my doctor. I told him I was suffering.

The next day, his reply arrived. He didn't try to explain away my experience. Instead, he invited me to become curious about it. He wondered how much of what I was feeling belonged to the patterns my nervous system had carried for years, and how much belonged to circumstances unconducive to my fullest flowering.

I stopped reading and went back to one sentence.

"…circumstances unconducive to your fullest flowering."

I had never thought about my life that way before.

The phrase stayed with me for days. I'd catch myself thinking about it while unpacking another box or folding another load of laundry. Sometimes I'd stop in the middle of an ordinary task and hear those words again. I wasn't trying to solve anything. I was simply living with the question. Instead of asking only what was happening inside me, I began wondering about the life I was creating around me. What in my daily life helped me flourish? What quietly depleted me? Which circumstances had become so familiar that I had stopped noticing their effect altogether?

A Gentle Invitation

As you move through the week ahead, I wonder...

What circumstance in your life has become so familiar that you've stopped asking whether it's helping you flourish?