The Cost of Our Next Life

I worked on the painting for a couple of hours yesterday. It was something I had envisioned for almost 6 months, since I first got here.

At the time I was done I liked it.
It was good.
Good enough.

But I did not love it.

It did not do this thing that I have learned to recognize as a YES.

I tried to settle into it, I tried to tell myself that good enough is good enough.
Every time I walked past it, I could tell that I was making an effort to like it more than I did.

Then I recognized that effort.

That effort to find the YES from the good enough.

As I walked past it one more time, I knew that I couldn’t do it.

So I took one last look at it and thanked it for having given me the opportunity to be true to myself.

Then I painted a nice coat of primer all over it, before going to bed.

It felt good. It felt honest.

I did hear the voice tell me a couple of times that I had wasted my time, that I had wasted some paint.

I heard the voice and re-connected with the honesty of the primer, the open invitation to truer possibilities.

I climbed into bed, opened my book and read these words by Glennon Doyle:

“Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.”