A small passing

“Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. That is what we are doing with this tale. We are listening to its ancient message. We are learning about deteriorative patterns so we can go on with the strength of one who can sense the traps and cages and baits before we are upon them or caught in them.” ~Clarissa Pinkola Estés

A Small Passing by Raina Gentry

It was a holiday Monday, and my husband and I were biking along a busy street to a park at the west end of the city when I noticed it – a bird, perched in the middle of the bike lane. I abruptly stopped my bike to get a closer look.

It was a small brown chick; calling out for help, desperately trying to chirp it’s way to safety. With one leg badly injured, it was unable to bring its little body into flight, lurching closer and closer into traffic. Pulled by some overwhelming maternal instinct, I felt I needed to do something, to guard, to protect, to help. We quickly picked up the bird and gently placed it in the fenced garden of a yard close by.

But as we biked away, I kept thinking about that little bird. Did we do the right thing? It haunted me.

Walking to work the next day, just as I came upon my office building, there on the sidewalk… were three dead waxwing birds, each one about a meter apart. The shock of this scene stopped me in my tracks. I paused long enough to mourn this small passing, to notice their beautiful gray bodies, the black and white flecks of colour, the yellow stripes on their tail feathers.

Shivers went through my body. Death, transformation, change. What is dying or wanting to die? What is calling for change?

That was how the week began, the week of my leave.

What does it mean to leave? How do we know when it’s time? What is the right way?

There are no instructions, no courses we can take, and it’s likely not something our parents taught us how to do. We are often fumbling in the dark with only a vague sense that something is wrong, or it shouldn’t be this way keeping us moving in a direction we feel compelled to move. Something other than logic is driving us.

The low hum of change begins to move through our bodies, our actions, our behaviours, before our minds have a chance to catch up. We may go weeks, months, even years pushing down the signs, numbing our senses, making excuses, ignoring our truths. Our dreams send us the messages we are not yet able to confront in our waking lives. For months, I dreamt of being chased by zombies.

Our passions atrophy, we become intolerant to what once nourished us. Over the past few years, I developed new allergens. Foods that once gave me great joy became painful and toxic.

For how long will we keep nursing ourselves by inches, only to put our still-injured bodies back into traffic?

We compartmentalize our lives, turn off our emotions, our bodies become hardened and rigid, focused on completing the task in front of us. We become worn out, injured, chronically ill. While training for a marathon, I injured my left leg. The next day, I trained again, and again the day after that. Until finally, I couldn't run – or walk – anymore.

How long will we continue to tolerate, put up with, make do with, settle for, agree to against our better judgment, sell ourselves short on, sell out on, override our instincts for, or shut our ears, eyes, voice, and heart to ignore?

When will we realize that it’s time to leave?

When the voice of our deepest Self becomes so loud that there is only one option to salvage what remains, it can be jarring, shocking, and painful – not only to us, but to those around us – because it is a kind of death, a kind of passing.

How do we leave a friendship? A partner? A job? How do we do this with integrity and grace? How do we navigate the boundaries between taking a stand and giving up? Have I failed? Will this failure haunt me for the rest of my life?

How do we remind ourselves weeks after, that we did our best? That there was no other way? That in order to heal, we cannot stay?

There are no universal answers here. But I can say that my own leave was born out of abandoning my own internal voice and warning signs for too long – ongoing symptoms, illnesses that became chronic, progressively getting worse. There had to be a breaking point.

It came with the realization that only I can be the expert of my own needs, my own body, my own spirit, my own journey, my own way of being in the world. It was the voice inside me that said... trust yourself.

And finally, I did.