Evan Renaerts

The Next Step

November 28, 2007

Last night many of the folks who live up and down this city block that I call home gathered in front of one house to wish the owner a happy birthday. She is 90 years old, still gardens, visits with her neighbours and volunteers in the community.

Just staying alive for a long enough time brings its own learning and one of the great metta-learnings is that life goes on regardless of our fears of making that “one fatal mistake.”

One of the things that I notice is how so many people get stopped, stuck in a place that gives them less and less return, because they don’t know what to do next. What I see is that we get where we are by doing what we know how to do and when that stops working we are not sure what to do next – it can seem like everything we think of is very much like what we have always done.

The other thing I notice, and this is based on experience more than observation, is that staying stuck in an unsatisfactory life situation is a seriously unhealthy option. People who stay stuck get sick and then get sicker yet; ultimately they may give up on life all together.

My own sense of how we get stuck and why we might stay there is that it can feel too dangerous to take the next step when we don’t have any past experience to reassure us that this particular step is safe and that we’ll be okay. We get stuck because we are at a place where what we have known is no longer sufficient to take us where we need to go.

One fear that people describe at these critical choice points is the fear of being annihilated. It is remarkable how similar are the descriptions of this psychic/emotional place – how to do what you don’t know how to do; how to go into a territory you have never seen and don’t understand.

I think of the early explorers who wondered, as they sailed, if they might come to the very edge of the world where the sea ran over the edge into the emptiness of space. Yet those explorers did the only thing we can do in these situations; they gathered up everything they knew how to do well, all their skills, and brought those together with their faith, whatever that faith was, and then moved away from what was known toward the next unknown.

This is the journey of life! This is the same journey we all take as we learn to crawl, then walk and so on all the way up to the place where our fear begins to stop us. When we look at fear we can see that it is always about the future; about what “might” happen next. Fear is one big hypothetical question about things that haven’t happened and may never happen.

There’s a great saying from self-help work, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” It sounds too simple to be taken seriously and yet it is what we must do if we want to live life rather than just put in time.

The next time you are feeling stuck, ask yourself, “What is the next bold step,” and then start moving.

Evan Renaerts
604 314 0835
evan@evanrenaerts.com