When push comes to shove
“Do you ever get the feeling that something is coming?” a friend wrote in an email recently. “That some kind of change is headed your way?”
She apologized for her vagueness, for maybe sounding a little bit crazy, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. I’ve felt that same thing myself.
As a teenager, I became enchanted with the idea of predestination, found comfort in the belief that a plan was already in place for the rest of my life and all that was required of me was to live it. How easy that was, to bear no responsibility one way or the other, to assume that regardless of the path I took, in the end, it had already been decided where I would emerge.
Gradually, my belief in predestination was replaced by the idea of fate, which to me was basically a slightly less organized, less elaborate version of the same thing. I could tell myself something simply was not meant to be and be satisfied. It was fate’s fault, not mine.
As I entered my late 30s, however, I began to realize that I had been wrong. Believing you’re helpless to change things, to affect the direction and quality of your life, is not just wrong, but lazy.
“Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice,” wrote William Jennings Bryan. “It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.”
That’s the kind of destiny I believe in now. That we have total say in who we are and who we become. Still, I think something more is going on, too. Something mystifying. Spiritual. Something the logical, scientific mind has trouble grasping.
Some people see it as karma–that if we do bad, bad things happen to us. And if we do good… But that’s a little too simple, a little too sweeping. Life, at least mine, isn’t that way. There’s no balancing scoreboard making certain no one gets cheated, that we reap an equal amount of what we have sown. But there are, I believe, little pushes. Something that helps us get what we need.
There have been many times I’ve felt myself nudged, felt directed to go a certain way. If I chose to ignore it, the nudge became a tug, then a push, then a shove.
Sometimes, the push frightens me, especially if I’m feeling shoved in a direction I wasn’t wanting to go. Before I met my husband, I’d sworn off men. I’d made plans for a life with just me and my daughter. There was no room in my plans for anyone else.
Nudge. Go to the conference.
I went to the conference.
Push. Go with your friends for a walk.
But it’s going to rain any minute, I argued with this . . . whatever it was.
Shove. Just go.
I went. It rained. Actually, it poured. It poured so hard my friends and I had to take cover on a nearby porch. Where Geoff, who is now my husband, was sitting.
I had recognized the shove. Argued with the shove. But I hadn’t ignored it.
Sometimes these shoves, when they come, are anything but gentle, nor are they always pleasant. They can be dealt to me, forced on me, not offered as a choice. Often, they seem more like punishment or the absolute last thing I’d want, but in every case where that’s happened, I’ve later discovered the reason behind it. Sometimes I had to work to make there be a reason, but I’ve come to believe that’s part of the plan.
Recently, on my daily quotes calendar, was one that I saved.
Good things are seldom handed to us. It often takes a push-one hard enough to make us leave our comfy nest-in order for us to go find, and value, those good things ourselves.
