Don’t Push The River

It’s always seemed to me that life is this constant circular experience of making a home for yourself, a house of belonging, and just as you have everything in place, there’s a knock on your door and you’re out. // David Whyte

There’s no getting around it—we all experience loss throughout our lives. We experience the loss of a loved one, a career, a marriage. Or, we can experience more ambiguous loss like the loss of unmet expectations or unfulfilled dreams. The list goes on. Loss is part of the human experience.

And, if we allow ourselves to fully feel the loss, no matter how small or big it might be, loss hurts.

I left Los Angeles a week ago and my wife and I moved to Nashville, TN. And while we love being in Music City (even though I don’t even know how to clap on beat), I had to really wrestle with the decision to leave LA. Truthfully, nothing in me wanted to leave the City Of Angels.

Because deep down, I knew that in leaving Los Angeles, I was really leaving something else behind. 

Over the few years that I lived in the LA, I came to really love it. While the move there was so unexpected, like any other time your heart leads you somewhere, I quickly realized how special of place it is. Like so many others can attest, there was something in the air that just made it electrifying. I can’t tell you how many times I would find myself driving down the coast or into the hills and would begin to weep for no other reason but because I could tangibly feel the expansion all around me. It had little to do with the multi-million dollar mansions or how driving a Rolls Royce was as common as driving a Subaru in the midwest, and more to do with resurrecting the parts of your heart that are buried beneath mounds of disappointment and seeing, maybe for the first time in a long time, what’s still possible. Yes, it represents endless possibility.

I don’t know. I think at some point along my journey, I lost touch with that part of myself—the dream big side of me—and Los Angeles reminded me.

As we got closer to really finalizing a decision around moving to Nashville, I could began to feel an all too familiar feeling began to surface—grief. Now, I’m not going to act like I'm so emotionally evolved and willingly face my grief head on because that just isn’t true. But, I’ve learned enough on my journey to began to realize when I’m avoiding feeling what I need to feel. And, I’ve learned the hard way.

Before moving to Los Angeles, I lived in Buffalo, NY. As I got closer to making the move to LA, my life felt like a pressure cooker and I knew that something as small as an elderly woman giving me a wrong look would send me over the edge. Deep down, I knew that I wasn’t giving myself the space to grieve what needed to be grieved and before I knew it—one wet morning as I was returning from the gym—my tires lost traction as I was making a turn into incoming traffic and I was t-boned. Luckily, no-one was hurt apart from minor scratches and bruises. But, I was now left without a car and I was finally forced to sit with my grief and to feel my pain. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried so much in my life.

Now, leading up to making the move from Los Angeles to Nashville, I didn’t find myself in a car wreck, thankfully, but I did bend over the wrong way one sunny SoCal afternoon and somehow mange to tear all the tissue in my lower back. Within seconds, I was crawling my way to the door hoping that Kara would come save me.

And, once again, I found myself laying in bed forced to feel what I needed to feel.

As I began to process with Kara what I was feeling and the big move that was coming soon, I began to realize that what I am grieving is not necessarily the loss of perfect weather, a city, beach or hills. Those are all going to be deeply missed, but what I’m really grieving is all of the unmet expectations of what I thought my life would look like as a result of me following my heart to Los Angeles.

More specifically, I’m grieving a familiar way of life, the only way of life I’ve ever known, that now no longer serves me.

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For as long as I can remember, there’s been this deep longing inside of me to find my unique way of belonging in this world—to find my place. That’s been my journey. A journey of descent to recover the innate treasures that my life carries—the deep hidden secrets of my destiny in hope to live out a more meaningful way of life. And while this search to fulfill this longing has brought me to my knees crying out my own version of ‘Oh God, Oh God, why have you forsaken me’, it also has birthed inside of me a deep sense of joy, gratitude and inner knowing that my life is being held by something far greater than my ability to have it all together.

For a performance driven person, this intimate experience of rest is life altering.

For the first time in my life, I finally felt and experienced what seems to have eluded me for so many years—the feeling of good enough, being good enough. But despite having this deep knowing that my life is being held by something or someone outside of myself, this insatiable need to fulfill this inner longing was and is still there. The stomach of my life, that seems like no matter how much I feed it, is still growling.

The part of this journey that I’ve had to wrestle with the most is that this drive to fulfill this inner longing has served me well.

It has literally been the driving force behind my life.

It’s the reason why I could walk away from the NFL and become a glorified janitor of a church so I could begin to get therapy and build resilience around the shame that was keeping me stuck and miserable in life. It’s the reason why wake up and intentionally lean into the emotional discomfort of self-growth and inner healing. It’s why I stay awake reading about how to self-regulate when I feel emotionally activated and learn how to re-parent that little child inside of me who is confused and scared. This inner longing is why I am so quick to embody the courage and say yes to where my heart is leading me, like to Los Angeles, despite the decision being the least logical decision, on paper, I could make for my life. Again, this driving force behind my life has served me so well.

And, it has trapped me.

The thing about Los Angeles is that it can challenge you in the most unimaginable ways. But for me, LA was also incredibly safe. While LA presented me with a series of obstacles and challenges to overcome, it also kept me in this cycle of life of waiting for this thing or longing to be fulfilled. It kept me in this cycle of peeking around the corner, or leaning into more healing, more self-growth, in hopes that today is the day that I really find what I’m looking for.

Meanwhile, this was all happening and left me avoiding the real work that needed to be done—surrendering and letting go of, once and for all, this individualistic pursuit of trying to find my thing and in return, embodying the courage to just be.

And, that’s how I knew it was time to leave Los Angeles.

I told Kara a while back that moving to Nashville feels like taking a step backwards in life. Of course, this has nothing to do with this great city or the great people of this city. But for me, Nashville represents a slower pace of life, which can be good and great, but the one thing my life has reinforced to me time and time again is that I don’t have time to slow down. For me, Nashville represents getting planted, finding community. And somewhere along the way, my internalized shame has always left me feeling that slowing down, getting planted and finding community was another way of saying I can’t cut it. It felt like mediocrity and settling.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Leaning into my life, being more present and giving up this individualistic pursuit to finding my thing or making my life happen in the way I expect it to happen is the work that I’m called to do in this season. And truthfully, I don’t know what it looks like but if there’s one thing that this journey has taught me is that I’m done trying to figure it out. I’m going to show up each day and just do my best to embody the courage to just be.

The truth is, when I started out on this healing journey, I needed help. There’s not question there. But, I also thought my healing journey was going to take me to new heights—a ‘bigger’ life that would satisfy this seemingly unsatisfiable hunger inside of me. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t—but now, I’m finally beginning to see that it’s irrelevant. I only needed a bigger life because the present moment was never enough—I was never enough.

I’m finally beginning to realize that this healing journey was never about changing my life or attracting a bigger life—it was all about coming full circle, back to myself, and learning how to surrender and radically accept my life. And it’s in this place of radical acceptance, where we let go of the regrets of the past and surrender to the uncertainty of the future and suffocate our dire need to be somebody, can we then allow ourselves to drop down, be fully present, and abide in what is.

Only now is it becoming clear that what I’ve been looking for and search for really has been with me this entire time.

On the drive from Los Angeles to Nashville, somewhere in the mountains of New Mexico, I was sitting in silence and admiring the beauty around me when I began to feel overwhelmed by this feeling that not only is my life being held but now it’s being carried. Almost immediately, I thought of a quote that I read from Richard Rohr a couple of years back.

Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.

For the first time in my life I realized that all I’ve been doing is trying to push the river. But now, it feels different. Now, I can tangibly feel the rivers of life moving and I’m in it.

I’m finally in the river.