Floating

After almost five months on the road we have now returned from our Latin American adventure.

Still homeless, jobless and getting ever closer to penniless, we’re currently floating between England and Germany, gratefully receiving the kindness of our family and friends who provide us with temporary homes.

Understandably, people ask what I have learned or what I have discovered on our travels and while there are indeed moments I recall, when certain insights or truths have dawned on me, I don’t necessarily feel like I’m suddenly full of answers or any kind of certainty.

Quite the opposite: if anything, I now have more questions than answers and less certainty than I ever had. Everything somehow seems less solid and more fluid.

For example, rather than having found myself, I think I have managed to truly lose my ‘Self’ in terms of this rigid idea of who it is that I thought I was. I’m not so sure anymore that I am this or that or this but not that and much more aware that it all depends on circumstances and is constantly changing.

In fact, I am reluctant to make up my mind about most things and refuse to say things are black or white, this or that. Instead I have found this wide-open space and a renewed sense of curiosity where I am willing to be surprised.

More than anything I am willing to not know, to not have an answer and to be okay with that.

That’s because the only certainty I have found is that I don’t know more than I do know and that I have been clinging to all sorts of illusory images and concepts of myself and the world in order to lull myself into some kind of security. The control freak side of me particularly liked to divide life into nice little boxes but life doesn’t work like that. Life is like a river. It’s constantly moving and changing and it provides no solid ground to stand on.

That’s the only truth I have found and I have decided to stick to this truth rather than a false sense of security based on an illusion. And the more I remind myself of this and train myself to bear the vulnerability of it, the more I feel comfortable with it.

I believe that once I am able to fully surrender to this natural, transitory flow of life, I won’t even have to try and swim or work hard at ‘keeping my head above water’ but will be able to just relax, lie back and float, knowing that I am supported as well as swept along.