Life Explorer: Road Back To Hope
The Road Back To Hope
The coming of my 62nd birthday in just over a months time coincides with a revelation. Increasingly over the last five years, the realisation has dawned on me that my life is not going to pan out quite in the way that I had imagined.
This is an uncomfortable truth to confront. However, it is true and a revelation born out of a situation that I have been doing my very best to avoid.
The result of my avoiding tactics is this – the writing of a book. Whenever I have tried to procrastinate, ignore, or even make excuses about the 'book', the 'inevitable' has happened to me. Something would occur or someone would mention that I should write a book. The result of that would to provoke varying emotions from outright disgust with myself to indignation that I was being intellectually lazy!
The book is one project that I have found great difficulty with. The book is about the lessons that I have learned in my life and how these may help others.
You see, dear reader, I am quintessentially English. Self promotion does not come easy. I am no longer young, in the full flush of youth. I am the 'new' middle aged (apparently) although it is a salutary lesson that my father died only 7 years older than me, worn out.
Middle aged. The words send a shudder through my soul. Immediately a picture forms in my mind of a callow youth, with pimples and long blond hair, talking earnestly about his life to come. On some long forgotten train journey from my home in Cornwall to London, squatting on the floor in an overcrowded train, talking with an equally acned challenged young girl about my future life, hopes and dreams. A time of idealistically expressed philosophies and how we were all going to change the world.
1968. A seminal year in modern social history in the West. A year of political revolution, fashion and songs that gave credence to the profound change that was taking place in our world. An overthrowing of the stifling society of the post war years but also the year when the idealism of the hippy years gave birth to something with far more sinister undertones.
43 years ago. A lifetime in its own right.
What was that youth expressing? Was it merely a dream, a vision that was flawed and all too easily tossed aside when illusion met reality? Or was it that young man's soul making its presence felt before the need to earn money, build a career and step out to meet the challenge of living a life?
The echoes of the past sit uncomfortably with the older man. So much has been experienced, so many casualties along the way. Innocence, hope, right ambition and, perhaps most poignantly of all, integrity.
Integrity. The loss of faith when the hard decisions had to be made. A bonfire of the vanities and, with that intense conflagration of that young man's hopes and desires for his life, the abandonment of true worth.
The sense, the knowing, of why we live a physical life in the first place.
My earliest recollection of 'life' (being something other than how I felt) was in my young childhood, at around 6 years of age. I can remember clearly, lying in my bed, in my darkened bedroom wondering 'who I was' or rather as I have come to understand it 'Who I Am'.
I am sure that many people do this. That instant moment of 'self' recognition. It is a strange sensation when you are quiet and the sudden realisation comes that you are aware of something that cannot be easily explained. For me, I also felt a great depth that there was 'someone' who lived just beyond me, with me but also out of reach.
It can be unnerving when you examine this unique sense of knowingness.
In modern life, with all its stresses and strains, we do not get many opportunities to do this. To connect to that hidden shadow of ourselves. Consequently, we accept life at face value believing that all that we feel, sense and experience is real. The pressures of earning our way in the world, raising a family, holding down a job, building a relationship – the interminable clutter of life crowds out serious introspection so we are left in a state of existence rather than one of being.
Out of my recent life changes I have come to understand that my future is linked to sharing the lessons of my life journey with others. I have created a workshop that is based on those lessons and the awakening of my spiritual understanding.
The result is the creation of the Life Explorer workshops. Perhaps, at long last I am now in touch with the dream of that young man , in a railway carriage in 1968. Perhaps, at long last I can start to fulfil the reason as to why I am living this life.
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