Last night, Dave shared a list he had written. He had gone away for a few hours and put some thought into what he wanted, generating a specific list with time goals. I was stunned by the whole thing, because it was so unlike him, and I realized, such a good thing for him. He puts his desires aside so often for the clamoring needs of the family that it was good for him to reflect and focus.
It stunned me just as much how alien such a list had become for me. I lived most of my earlier life going from station to station. I lived off lists like that. My whole life was a list (while single, I listed a goal of having “four to five kids by age 35”—check). By all accounts, I have arrived: gotten into schools, finished degrees, married great guy, bought starter house, acquired permanent house, finished having kids, good job gig, have a pet, in great school district, physically fit—by whatever metric you want to use, I’m there.
But somehow, I have arrived a totally different person. I used to go from station to station without thinking much beyond what our meritocratic culture, combined with my goal-oriented stubbornness, told me to do. But even if you go somewhere just to achieve more, you can’t divorce yourself from the culture of the place, from becoming the kind of person who works there, even if it’s not what you fully intended or even understood beforehand. I caught this happening early enough to decide to stop. That was at the end of residency, and that was the last time I made a list like Dave’s.
Then began a strange and curious process. Not much happened anymore on an external level—well, kids and moves, but nowhere near the kind of external intensity and pressure I lived in before. All the movement was in my interior landscape. It was a process of inner transformation that came through relationships, and time, and encountering myself and God in many different, deeper, and truer ways than I ever had before. I never knew what to say when people asked how I was doing: nothing much different externally, but always something happening internally.
I read recently about a man who, on moving from India to the U.S., “missed being surrounded by people who felt the vertical spiritual dimension in everyday life.” He missed being in a place that perceived reality through a sacred lens, where people felt that there are “spiritual realities in physical, imminent things.” He began to call the U.S. a “flatland,” a thinner realm. The reverse is how this process of transformation feels for me: like going from the flatlands to a world where everything has spiritual topography.
The irony is that I have “arrived,” only to find that arriving is a construct of the flatlands. And therefore something I note with detachment, but find functionally useless. I have a lot to be thankful for: just as I always have. And there is nothing, nothing that can satisfy the longings of my heart outside of God and sitting in his presence. I have just as many longings, struggle just as much with discontentment, as I ever have, but the longings are deeper, rawer. I kept myself too busy, too focused on the list, to really understand them before.
I find myself not really wanting to make a list. My longings are not of the sort that can be enumerated upon with time goals. I find lately that I experience them like waves, of color or feeling; they are something I am immersed in, something I must walk through, something I cannot entirely shake off but must rather sit with. I went in the last few months from a place of extremely productive spiritual discipline, to a place of acedia, detachment and what one writer calls “a sluggishness of the soul,” and I found that the only language that appealed to me was the language of longing. I read a lot of Ruth Haley Barton. I asked myself what it was I desired. And in the end, the response I encountered was always the same: sit with the desire, unmet. Go out and stand on the mountain, like Elijah, and wait.
In the flatlands, everything was achieved by individual effort. In the vertical dimension, I come again and again to a place where my longings are not pointing me to achieve more (on the contrary, I am acutely aware I should not try to), but inviting me to sit more with God. He understands and sees all the layers of longing in my being; I am sure of that. I don’t know where things will go. But apparently it was never about external arrival to begin with.
