Blog

Rebuilding

• June 2011
• Simple Living Climb

Dear Steph:
I read your book with complete fascination. Your thoughts on living simply, working hard and with focus, being outside and living life on your own terms resonated with me. I’m hoping you can give me some perspective on rediscovering yourself after a relationship ends.

I left my fiancé just days before our wedding. I didn’t even realize how controlling he had become, and how much I had given up of myself, until concerned friends stepped in. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but the best decision I’ve ever made. Now that the dust has settled, I want to rebuild an amazing life.

I can’t pretend to know anything about you, but in your blog I see someone thriving, living life with gusto. You don’t make easy decisions; you make the right decisions for you. What do you tap into when you’re swimming against the current? How do you hear that voice that tells you who you really are? If you were in my shoes, how would you go about reassembling the pieces of a (thankfully) broken open self? I feel like I have an opportunity to start anew, but I’m not quite sure where to begin.

I would truly appreciate hearing your thoughts. Thank you for considering.

Sincerely,
Robyn

Dear Robyn,
Getting your letter means a lot to me, because it shows me how important connection is. Thank you very much for writing to me, really. It reminds me that all of us here are part of a whole, and when we can share our experiences, it helps us to find the flow we are all trying to feel in life. That’s what every creature needs, the freedom to live in its most natural way, and I think for humans there is so much external complication that it can be surprisingly hard to get.

I’m sorry about your loss, because that’s what ending a relationship is–no matter what it was like–like most other painful things in life. Most people would like to be unattached, but that is a really hard thing to achieve. I had an experience too where for a while I felt like my world kept falling apart, and then doing it some more and some more…. It was hard. It was also conflicted for me, because I am a believer in Sufi philosophy and nonattachment, and the fundamental truth of “joy at sudden disappointment“–that “whatever comes, comes for a reason. When misfortune comes, we must quickly praise!”

It was pretty disappointing to me that I was not immediately able to be genuinely joyful and thankful when I found myself faced with lots of disappointment in life, and that I was unable to immediately let things flow through my fingers like sand. I did not quickly praise, I struggled pretty hard for a while–intellectually I did have faith in my philosophies, but I didn’t truly feel joyful about what was happening in the moment. It showed me that sometimes it’s easier to believe in things than it is to actually live them. In Buddhism, they say that there is a kind of learning you can gain through study and reading, but there is a fuller type of learning you can gain only through experience. I think that’s true. Though it’s something I studied and believed, I learned better through my own experience that usually difficult things lead you to a better place. I also learned that nothing is permanent, another thing I thought should be obvious 🙂 And I learned that struggle in itself makes a person more thoughtful, more empathetic and more appreciative of life–all qualities that I value a lot.

Rebuilding is a very apt word for what we do in life. Nothing is forever, and nothing stays the same. Even huge rock walls fall down all the time. That’s just how things are. When you work at something and build something, it’s very likely to fall down or you may even find yourself having to take it apart yourself. So that might be depressing or frustrating, but after a while you start to see that it’s part of the cycle of life. Also, it’s pretty rare to do something perfectly the very first time. So you build another thing, and usually that one is better, which shows you that in fact it really was lucky that the first one went away. And that is actually joy at sudden disappointment. Life is change–without change, there would be no life at all.

I think all decisions are similar in a way–usually you know at heart what is the best choice, the thing that will be the most positive, the thing that just feels right even if it’s hard or scary or others will discourage you. Even things that are complicated are really pretty simple if you look directly at them. Sometimes I talk to people who are regretful, or seem unappreciative of their life and the choices that brought them there–like “I wish I had been able to climb all the time, but I had kids/got a job on Wall Street/liked skiing too much.” I find that a strange way to feel. If you are careful to make your choices in line with your priorities, you don’t feel regretful about what you didn’t do, you feel appreciative of the decisions you made and the place those decisions has taken you to.

So I guess a good question to ask yourself is, what are my priorities? As in, what matters most to you in life? If you can figure those out and consciously name them (for example, my greatest priorities are freedom and simplicity–for other people, it’s their children or security or adventure or whatever it may be), then most decisions become easier to make and you will never feel doubtful or coulda/shoulda later, because you know you made them with intention, in harmony with your priorities.

Just some thoughts. The one thing I would bet beer on is that a year from now you will look back and say, “I’m so glad all of that happened. Everything is so good now!”
Steph