The Wounded Warrior Rises: An Ode To Dancing In The Darkness
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
- Rumi
Jeanette found herself waking up past noon again. The same old story, the same old life. With countless motivational books and healing works at getting better, she found herself back in the rut.
Why couldn’t she succeed? She wonders.
She had tried so many methods. Probably way more than the average person had tried. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe her problem was doing too much.
Just like every other time, Jeanette had written out a detailed plan this time for her next latest endeavor. The aspiration of all aspirations. End of all end. The one that would catapult her to great success. Obliterated and leave all the other failures she had behind in the dust. In fact, she had rewritten her plans not once, but multiple times. Each time adding on or taking away elements that she found were either beneficial or obsolete to the Grand Plan she had in mind for her life. But the plan doesn’t work. She woke up late again. Despite the best intention and effort that she put in, her plans always failed through.
It doesn’t matter what she did. How hard she tried. How much she envisioned, read, learned, or did. Every step, every breath, every progress she had taken, they had all taken her for a joyride back to the starting line. Back to square one, to ground zero, to the drawing board once more, where as though all her attempts had been non-existent.
Lazy was what they called her.
No one knew how hard she worked. But even now she was starting to despise all of her work. She felt almost paralyzed to take any action forward, like a self-prophecy staring into the crystal ball of her own fate, knowing, fearing for the worst that she would face rejection once more. It all sounds so ridiculous, hopeless, and tedious.
But still, the smallest glimmer of light wouldn’t fade. Just a tiny speck of flame, but it was still burning.
Maybe the light is what I need to tap into.
But how would she find the light? Or moreover, how would the light find her?
Frustrated, dejected, furious, depressed, as she always was, always on the edge of giving up, always on the edge of hanging on by a mere thread, she was ready to give it all up. On everything.
With the exception of one plan.
She could remember clearly one plan that she stuck to till the very end. She just needed to find the element of why that plan met with such roaring success and why the rest were all flops. She needed desperately to resuscitate and replicate that old plan of her that had helped her succeed when all others have made her a failure.
Passion, purpose, personal power, motivation, meditation, drive, willpower, legacy. She had sat all by herself in quiet rooms before.
The expressway, the highway, the middle way, the sideway, she had been through all those paths.
Knowing her why, elements, SWOTs, and priorities matrix, she had all but known thyself.
Intention, belief, hope, faith, and love. She was no stranger to 1 Corinthians 13 nor the rest of the verses.
Circumstances, environments, events, and situations. Like seeing through a color-filtered lens that didn’t belong to her.
Mindmaps, google sheets, plain papers, it was like a big conglomerate of cities intricately spread out together on the world map of her Self.
Remember where you came from… a voice whispered to her.
Do you remember?
Why did that one single plan work when all else failed? Sure, she could think of a few reasons. And it wasn’t for all of the reasons above. It was out of fear.
It was her fear, not her pain that pushed her on when her heart was breaking. When the world around her was in chaos, the funds were low, and the family split… it was the darkness that pushed her into the light.
It wasn’t faith but fear. Not purpose but pain. Not desire but death. Not hope but hate. Not vision but the veil.
The way to turn her world around was to turn her world upside down. By leaning into the darkness, she would become the light.
Be wild and free,
Li Ting
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