At the ocean last week, I spent lots of time looking at sea shells. Shells have always struck me as extraordinary treasures to be discovered among the rocks and sand. In all their strength, protectiveness and beauty, there is not a straight line among them.
Same for trees and flowers and everything that grows: no straight lines.
And yet somehow, when I look at my own growth and healing, I think it’s going to go on a straight trajectory. I somehow think that this will heal and then that will heal and then *bingo-bango* I’ll be all healed just like new.
Which, no.
That’s not the way it happens. It’s never the way it happens. The way it happens is much more like the flight path of a moth or the ripple of a wave or the spiral of a shell.
So when an x-ray of my foot revealed that one of the screws in the titanium plate is spiraling itself out of my beautifully healed bone, I shouldn’t have been surprised.* And yet I was.
On the left, a happy, snugged in screw. On the right, screw says, I’m out.
Do you ever do this with your own learning, growth or healing? Do you imagine that it will move along in a progressive straight line from where you are to where you want to go?
I’m grateful for the reminder that non-linear healing is normal and natural. It’s the way all living things change. I’m curious about what might happen if I approach this as a detour rather than a setback. A chance to see, do and experience something different or unexpected.
Am I glad that one of my foot screws has decided to leave the premises?
Nope. Not glad or amused by this twist in the path at all.
And I have a chance to see what happens in the space around practicing radical acceptance and non-resistance. I keep reminding myself to breathe and relax my barnacle-tight grip on the way I think things ought to be.
It can help me to acknowledge everything: my desire for it to be a different, my ability to see what is so, and, like finding a moon shell under a pile of seaweed, to look for a treasure in the messiness.
* It’s all OK. Thanks to the modern medicine that put the plate and screws into my foot to allow my bone to heal as well as it has, it’s a simple (albeit a little annoying, inconvenient and uncomfortable) procedure to remove it. That’s what they tell me, anyway!