I went back to my digging.
The next morning when I woke up and remembered the dream, I realized what an important message it contained from my inner self to me. The garden represented the life I’d known that had looked perfect on the outside, orderly and attractive in every way. There I was digging an enormous hole right in the middle of all that beauty, uprooting the plants and flowers, throwing dirt on top of what had once been so carefully designed and cultivated. This was just what I’d been doing in my waking world—questioning every aspect of my life; uprooting old beliefs, goals and ideas I’d never had the courage to challenge; making some radical changes.
Who was the woman screaming at me? One interpretation was that she represented many people in my life who disapproved of the intense transformational process I was undergoing. To them, I was just making a mess. They preferred the orderly version of Barbara and Barbara’s life, the one they recognized and understood. Many people who worked for me or with me had been watching in thinly veiled horror as I chose to do less and less. Some were frightened about what would happen to them if I made too many changes. Would they lose their jobs? Some were angry as I downsized my life—would they miss out on opportunities or income because I was no longer willing to overextend myself or to do things that weren’t fulfilling to me? Others, including several friends, were threatened by my very act of questioning, afraid that somehow it would rub off on them, and they would suddenly find themselves wildly digging up their own orderly gardens.
Of course, I knew the deeper meaning of the woman screaming at me: she was a piece of my own self, horribly alarmed at my process of radical questioning that was turning my life upside down. “What are you doing?” that part of Barbara was yelling at me. “You’re destroying everything you worked so hard to build. It was perfect. Now you’re ruining it. Why are you doing this?”
Why was I doing this? How did I get here with a shovel in my hand, unearthing all the goals and dreams I’d spent so much time planting and protecting? It was a good question with no simple answer. I was reexamining everything because events I couldn’t have predicted were forcing me to travel down roads for which I had no map. I was searching for clarity, for revelation, called by something I could not yet define, something compelling me to reassess everything about myself and my life. I was digging because somehow I knew it was time to dig.
Did I know where all of this was leading? No, and that was indeed terrifying. I had never liked proceeding without a carefully structured plan, and to do so in my late forties felt foolhardy and even dangerous. But my illuminating dream had reminded me that although I didn’t know where I would end up, I did know what I was doing—I was digging deep for wisdom, allowing the process of questioning and contemplation to penetrate me to my very core, so I could emerge transformed and more in touch with my true self than ever before.
Living in the Questions
Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given For you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, And perhaps without knowing it You will live along, someday into the answers. —Rainer Maria Rilke
So how do we dig deep for wisdom? Where do we begin? The first step is simply to admit to yourself that you are where you are—in a place of uncertainty or confusion or doubt, in a time of reevaluation and reassessment, in a process of transformation and rebirth.
Digging deep for wisdom means:
Being honest about the fact that at least for the moment, your reality is comprised more of questions than answers.
Allowing these questions to exist, acknowledging that they are piled up around you like mysterious boxes waiting to be opened.
Not fleeing from the questions anymore, but embracing them, entering into them, and in turn inviting them to take root inside you.
This is not an easy task—facing your questions can be a painful, unnerving process. Most of us are much more comfortable with answers than with questions, much more at ease with certainty than with doubt. Too often we flee from our uncertainties, desperate to get back to hard facts, to emotional and intellectual solid ground, to things we are sure of. We do not like to linger too long in the land of “I don’t know.”
This reluctance is understandable. We live in a society where absolute certainty, even if it is biased, narrow-minded, or just plain incorrect, is rewarded—just turn on the television or radio and you will be barraged with countless examples of this: opinionated commentators who never waver from their rigid points of view; talk show experts who harshly preach black and white and nothing in between; reality TV contestants who win the prize, the date, the proposal or the job, often because they display the most unwavering, arrogant assuredness. Doubt, hesitation, introspection—these don’t sell. Certainty does. Is it any wonder, then, that we learn to bury our uncertainties beneath a thick covering of avoidance and denial?
Imagine going to a party and seeing an acquaintance you haven’t been in touch with for some time. “How have you been?” your friend asks. Most likely, you wouldn’t answer, “Actually, I’m confused. You see, I am in a period of deep questioning.” To confess that you are unsure or disoriented would make you feel vulnerable, insecure, exposed. To admit, even to yourself, that you are feeling lost can cause you to feel that somehow you have failed.
This is precisely what will happen when you begin to dig deep—at least in the privacy of your own heart. You will begin to question. You will begin to ask yourself, “How did I get here?” You will feel disoriented, vulnerable, even lost.
But you are not lost.
“How did I get here?” has a “here” in it. You are somewhere. Just because you may not yet understand where that somewhere is does not mean you are in the wrong place, or even necessarily off course. To arrive at a place we don’t recognize is indeed a legitimate destination in life.
A few weeks ago I met my friend Molly for coffee. I hadn’t seen her for a while, and Molly, who is a single parent with a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, proceeded to tell me about her latest crisis. Molly’s daughter had been lying to her, hanging out with some very troubled kids, and neglecting her schoolwork. “I am so stressed out,” Molly confessed. “After all I have done for Jenna, how can she treat me like this? It makes me feel like I am a bad mother and that I haven’t done a good job. And of all times—I am so swamped at work. I’ve decided I’m giving myself two days to process all of this, and then I’m putting it behind me.”
As Molly finished her story, she noticed that in spite of my best efforts to disguise it, I was smiling. “What?” she said. “I know you, Barbara, and when you get that look on your face, it means you’re about to tell me something you are seeing about my situation that I haven’t figured out yet! Come on, I can take it.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “Actually, I was just thinking how much you remind me of myself. Throughout my life, I have always been in a rush to find the answers, to have the realizations, to get to certainty about everything. When you said that you were giving yourself two days to process your problems with Jenna, and no more, it cracked me up! It’s like insisting, ‘I will extract the lesson from this now even if it kills me!’ Whenever I have done this, it’s my way of trying to get things back under control. I am in a hurry to find solutions because I feel so uncomfortable lingering in the problems.”
Molly laughed. “You’re right. Part of me just wants to get this whole thing over with. But I know it is going to take a lot longer than two days to deal with how I am feeling. I just can’t help wishing there was a way to speed it up.”
We all know how Molly feels. After all, we live in a society defined by our hunger for instant gratification. When I enter the word “instant” into my computer’s search engine, I get 25,700,000 references, instantly, of course! From instant soup