The Things We Carry Past Their Season

The night before I returned to the Omega Institute for a Solar Eclipse Astrology retreat, I had a nightmare about everything I hadn't finished.

The boxes still sitting around our house months after our move. The bathroom that still needed painting. Our 2025 tax returns. The damage to my car from an accident last fall. The breathwork practice I had been trying to get moving again. I don't remember exactly how the dream unfolded, but I remember waking up with the familiar feeling that accompanied it: guilt.

My mind has a habit of doing this when I am about to do something entirely for myself. It begins taking inventory of everything I could be doing instead. There is always evidence available. Something needs attention. Someone could use my help. A project is waiting. Something I promised myself I would finish still isn't finished.

And here I was, preparing to return to Omega because I wanted to go.

The last time I had been there, I found myself thinking about the questions that follow us through different seasons of our lives. I had come home paying closer attention to the questions that were finding me.

Now I was going back with one already waiting.

Why am I like this?

I wanted to understand why unfinished things weighed on me so heavily. I could look at my life and see plenty of evidence that I was capable of getting things done, yet my attention seemed naturally drawn toward whatever remained incomplete. Beginning had always come easily to me. Finishing was another story.

I carried that question into the retreat as my intention for the weekend, and if I'm honest, there was still quite a bit of judgment inside it. Why am I like this? wasn't entirely curiosity. Some part of me wanted to identify the problem so I could finally fix it.

But before I left home, I had already done something differently.

I asked for help.

I told Kamil about some of the things that were weighing on me and asked if he would take care of them while I was away. Asking was uncomfortable, but what came next may have been harder. I allowed my request to be fulfilled without stipulations or instructions.

I didn't leave detailed directions for how everything should be handled. I didn't decide what should happen to every object in every remaining box. I didn't turn asking for help into another project for me to manage. I trusted him to understand what I was asking and to do it in his own way, and then I went to Omega.

While I was there, I kept returning to my question.

At some point during the weekend, I began thinking about the moon phase I was born under. I was born under a balsamic moon, the final phase of the lunar cycle before the moon goes dark and begins again. Astrologically, it is associated with completion, release, surrender, and the ending of cycles.

I couldn't help but appreciate the irony.

Here I was, someone born beneath a moon associated with endings, sitting at a retreat during a solar eclipse asking why I seemed to have such a complicated relationship with finishing things.

The symbolism made me curious. Maybe there was something about completion itself that I hadn't understood. Finishing something means accepting that it will no longer be in progress. Whatever possibility lived inside it becomes something more definite. Eventually, we have to turn our attention somewhere else.

I didn't arrive at some grand explanation while I was at Omega. The question stayed with me, and I think that was useful. For once, I wasn't trying to turn insight into an action plan before I'd even finished having it.

Then I came home.

Many of the things that had visited me in my nightmare were finished.

Kamil had done what I asked.

Boxes that had been sitting around for months were gone. Decisions had been made. Things that had occupied physical space in our home and mental space in my head simply weren't waiting for me anymore.

What struck me was how little effort the completion had required from me.

There had been no frantic final push. I hadn't spent an exhausting weekend forcing myself through a list. I hadn't overseen every decision or made sure everything happened according to the picture in my head.

I had asked for help and allowed myself to receive it.

That sounds simple. For me, it wasn't.

I've spent much of my life being capable. I know how to figure things out, take responsibility, make decisions, and keep moving. Those qualities have served me well, and I value them. Somewhere along the way, though, I may also have developed a fairly specific idea about what it means to finish something properly.

Maybe that was part of what I had been carrying.

Not only the unfinished things themselves, but all of my rules about how they were supposed to become finished.

I've been thinking about that distinction ever since. There are things in our lives that genuinely need our attention and things that matter enough to deserve our persistence. There are also things we continue carrying because we haven't considered that completion might look different from what we originally imagined.

Sometimes someone else can help.

Sometimes the plan can change.

Sometimes good enough really is enough.

Sometimes the version of us who began something doesn't get to dictate exactly how the version of us living now must finish it.

I am still thinking about the question I carried into Omega, but it sounds different to me now. Why am I like this? has softened into something closer to: What have I been asking of myself that I might not need to ask anymore?

I don't have a complete answer.

Maybe that's appropriate.

For now, I'm noticing how much lighter something can become when I loosen my grip on the way I thought I had to carry it.

A Gentle Invitation

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

What are you carrying that might become lighter if you loosened your grip on how it has to be resolved?