Know Place Like Home: Stepping Underneath the Waterfall That Is Nodus Tollens

Look around. Many people seem to be feeling as if they are in a profound transition, both professionally and personally. For many us, it may feel as if we have been placed on a cosmic see-saw, especially this summer.
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Perhaps you have been feeling a little off lately. Or, for a long time. Maybe the life you once knew to be flowing so marvelously well suddenly feels different. Or, you simply sense that you are being asked to do something else--with your "job," home life, relationships and more.

Maybe you are not alone.

Look around. Many people seem to be feeling as if they are in a profound transition, both professionally and personally. For many us, it may feel as if we have been placed on a cosmic see-saw, especially this summer. The breeze blowing across our faces on the way "up" feels just glorious--new ideas, new insights, new, new, new. However, on the way back down it has been a mixed bag of emotions--butterflies in the tummy every time we receive a vivid reminder that one era of life seems to be ending and that the new one... well, just has not emerged.

A similar thing has been unfolding on my end. It seemed to amplify around the release of my memoir Grace Revealed" back in Chicago in February. I was acutely aware that the subject matter of the book--my journey uncovering my Polish family's journey surviving Joseph Stalin's mass deportation of Polish people during the 1940s and the events that followed--was deep and, at times, haunting. I knew that I most likely needed to, for lack of a better word, "recover." But my growing discomfort at that time felt more than just your garden variety burnout. I had also come off of a 14-year tenure running a newspaper in Central California. Maybe the combo of the two events triggered something within? There was something, too: I had grown weary of having to morph into my own über publicist and search for Twitter Followers, Facebook comrades and Instagram fans.

Well, truth be told, it felt as if The Gods had picked me up like a ketchup bottle, turned me over, unscrewed the cap (my crown chakra?) and waited for its contents (the Me that I once knew to be Me) to be emptied out--completely. And, perhaps, explore something new about the idea of home and place.

I recall asking for (more) signs for guidance.

I received them.

In fact, I did something that some would call rebellious: I diverted taking on a new corporate media job and accepted a colleague's offer to oversee 293 young olive trees in an olive grove on their property in, of all places, Maui. (Something only The Gods could have coordinated me thinks.) I left everything I knew back on The Mainland and showed up for several months of care-taking. My task, it seemed was, simply to officially step into uncharted territory without any real road map and--what's this?--Trust?

Yes. The T-word.

I suppose that's a fine roadmap to have and if you're going to keep asking The Universe for signs and the only one it keeps giving you begins with the letter T then, well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it all out.

Trust.

Well, this did wonders for my active mind. I left "corporate media" on the 20th anniversary of my midlife crisis--which I launched long ago to get out of the way (alas, it lingered)--and woke up in Maui's upcountry, where I have been for six weeks.

I meditate--more. I breathe--more. I watch my mind--freak out (occasionally).

As I have previously written, tending to the olive trees affords me an opportunity to slow down--more than I have ever slowed down before--and pay attention (in a new way). The olive trees are good teachers, after all. They take years to grow and come into fruition so it's not as if one day you wake up and suddenly--boom, bam, there be olives on the trees! Eureka! No, Mother Nature knows what the heck She is doing. She can take her time. And so, I monitor the trees every morning and evening. Like a sheep dog on a prairie, I watch--and, me being me, I send off a blessing to the grove every now and then.

Why not? Good juju is good juju.

As a result, in just a short amount of time, I have realized that the life I had prior to coming here was often filled with a never-ending swirl of "doing." In the past two decades, I penned five books--two which are published--oversaw creative direction of a newspaper for 14 years, wrote articles about Hollywood for magazines, covered red carpet Hollywood events, took three to four Bikram yoga classes a week, breathed in, out, and God knows where else, and taught a series of fitness classes, dripping in perspiration to arrive somewhere every step of the way (more or less).

But as I continue to reflect back on that era, two major things stand out. 1) I rarely took the time to fully integrate all that I had accomplished and all that happened to me and the people around me--you know, as in, honor it. How many of us are taught to slow down and allow integration to happen? We do so much in this life. And 2) That somewhere in there, I lost the Me that was having fun being a creative person and began to crave the acceptance and recognition from the outside world (more). I was, in effect, waiting for the outside world to tell me: "Oh my God, Greg ... you've arrived! At last. Welcome! Here's a coupon for 20 percent off on the finest chocolate! Gosh... we sure dig you!"

Funny thing is, whenever "the world" did "validate," me, I rarely allowed it to fully sink in.

And that's the downright funky thing about that "I WANT" pattern. It has a voracious appetite and just keeps wanting--more. Its sister mindset is unique, too. I call it the REALLY WANTING TO GET THERE from HERE mindset. It knows nothing else other than REALLY WANTING TO GET THERE. There is no NOW in REALLY WANTING TO GET THERE. Not really. There is just REALLY WANTING TO GET THERE.

We are often told that acceptance and love are an inside job, but are are rarely told that in the process of true self-acceptance and self-love we must confront our shadow side, which, let's face it, is not often glamorous. (Or so we think.) For me, the shadow is the place where Fear, Doubt, Worry and Shame, to note but four, seem to have been having one hell of a house party. My occasional (fine ... lingering) resistance to facing them has forced my mood to swing with reckless abandon (at times, but not all the time, I swear!) But I have come to believe that there is something lush and wonderful to be had if we simply allow ourselves to just sit in our own shadow. By allowing ourselves to face what is most frightening, it loses its strong current.

Basically, you go from "Oh S**t!" to "Oh Shift!"

I came across this sign recently and I loved it:

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My entire Maui adventure thus far, while remarkable and stellar, has had some strangeness. When you are asked to give up being the You you were being so that another kind of You can emerge, this thing called the Ego starts screaming: "Really? You've got to be kidding me with this? Can't we just go back to our regularly scheduled programming?"

I suppose we can, but would it spark real inner growth?

On the very same day I found the sign above, a friend of mine tagged me on Facebook. She had posted a List of Obscure Sorrows. There were 23 of them in there. To which I thought: "Huh, only 23?"

(What can I say? I am a writer, I mood swing and my habit of always wanting more nearly gets the best of me.)

That said, one term on the list stood out: Nodus Tollen. It is the realization that "the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore--that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages that you don't understand, that don't even seem to belong in the same genre--which requires you to go back and reread the chapter you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose you own adventure."

Well ... that was just the right kind of spiritual Viagra I needed.

So here's a shout out to anybody who might be in the midst of their own Nodus Tollen: You are not alone. Embrace it. Because ... the alternative may not be pretty.

I sense we are all being given opportunities to ask ourselves a very important question: How can I best serve?

Yes--that.

I remember writing in "Grace Revealed" ... that "there is nothing worse than Hanging On when you know full well you're supposed to be Letting Go. It wastes precious time and besides, your fingernails become unbelievably soiled from all the time spent clawing at the dirt of the cliff of which you are strongly being urged to let go."

Familiarity can be a nice thing. However, there comes a time in life when all the "signs" keep insisting that you keep "letting go," experience something new and be of service in a new way. We can either surrender or resist until we're driven mad by the stubborn will to remain exactly the same. It must be in the former where transformation can occur.

I am counting on it.

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