Steeping is action

'Steeping is action,' my counselor interrupted. 

I hate it when she does this.  Here I was in the middle of a perfectly good monologue and on the cusp of a rather poetic rhetorical question, when she interrupts with a completely solid, simple truth. 

Her statement arrested my self-loathing momentum, so I stopped.  I had been seen. I had also been wrong.  I was more fond of complaining than I was learning that day.

So I bit: 'what does that mean?'  The truth was self-evident, so what I think I meant was 'why was this so important you had to interrupt me?'  We'd spent the better part of an hour talking about a transition -- that liminal space between what was and not yet being what will be -- and I wanted to arrive.  I wanted 'what will be' to become 'what is.' Now.  

I also wanted agency.  I wanted active verbs. I sought advice on what I could do, read, workshop; something that made me feel like I had some control. 

I'd played the victim too long and wanted to be an active participant in my own becoming. 

When I was a kid, I would hang from the door frame trying to will my body to grow longer.  I did eventually grow taller but through no action of my own, despite the damage to the door frame. The doctors told me the best thing I could do to grow taller was sleep. 

This is the challenge in our physical, psychological and spiritual development too -- we can't will ourselves to grow.  Rather, we must sit in the liminal space, steeping in the hot water of transition, even if we don't like it. 

And I don't like it. But this is the way things are. Some things must come as they come.