How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life

“What are you doing?” she yelled. “You’re destroying the garden. It was perfect. Now you’ve ruined it. What’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”

I turned to the woman and calmly answered: “I’m digging deep for wisdom.” Then I went back to my digging.

The next morning when I woke up and remembered the dream, I realized what an important message it contained from my inner self to me. The garden represented the life I’d known that had looked perfect on the outside, orderly and attractive in every way. There I was digging an enormous hole right in the middle of all that beauty, uprooting the plants and flowers, throwing dirt on top of what had once been so carefully designed and cultivated. This was just what I’d been doing in my waking world—questioning every aspect of my life; uprooting old beliefs, goals and ideas I’d never had the courage to challenge; making some radical changes.

Who was the woman screaming at me? One interpretation was that she represented many people in my life who disapproved of the intense transformational process I was undergoing. To them, I was just making a mess. They preferred the orderly version of Barbara and Barbara’s life, the one they recognized and understood. Many people who worked for me or with me had been watching in thinly veiled horror as I chose to do less and less. Some were frightened about what would happen to them if I made too many changes. Would they lose their jobs? Some were angry as I downsized my life—would they miss out on opportunities or income because I was no longer willing to overextend myself or to do things that weren’t fulfilling to me? Others, including several friends, were threatened by my very act of questioning, afraid that somehow it would rub off on them, and they would suddenly find themselves wildly digging up their own orderly gardens.

Of course, I knew the deeper meaning of the woman screaming at me: she was a piece of my own self, horribly alarmed at my process of radical questioning that was turning my life upside down. “What are you doing?” that part of Barbara was yelling at me. “You’re destroying everything you worked so hard to build. It was perfect. Now you’re ruining it. Why are you doing this?”

Why was I doing this? How did I get here with a shovel in my hand, unearthing all the goals and dreams I’d spent so much time planting and protecting? It was a good question with no simple answer. I was reexamining everything because events I couldn’t have predicted were forcing me to travel down roads for which I had no map. I was searching for clarity, for revelation, called by something I could not yet define, something compelling me to reassess everything about myself and my life. I was digging because somehow I knew it was time to dig.

Did I know where all of this was leading? No, and that was indeed terrifying. I had never liked proceeding without a carefully structured plan, and to do so in my late forties felt foolhardy and even dangerous. But my illuminating dream had reminded me that although I didn’t know where I would end up, I did know what I was doing—I was digging deep for wisdom, allowing the process of questioning and contemplation to penetrate me to my very core, so I could emerge transformed and more in touch with my true self than ever before.

Living in the Questions

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given For you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, And perhaps without knowing it You will live along, someday into the answers. —Rainer Maria Rilke

So how do we dig deep for wisdom? Where do we begin? The first step is simply to admit to yourself that you are where you are—in a place of uncertainty or confusion or doubt, in a time of reevaluation and reassessment, in a process of transformation and rebirth.

Digging deep for wisdom means:

Being honest about the fact that at least for the moment, your reality is comprised more of questions than answers.

Allowing these questions to exist, acknowledging that they are piled up around you like mysterious boxes waiting to be opened.

Not fleeing from the questions anymore, but embracing them, entering into them, and in turn inviting them to take root inside you.

This is not an easy task—facing your questions can be a painful, unnerving process. Most of us are much more comfortable with answers than with questions, much more at ease with certainty than with doubt. Too often we flee from our uncertainties, desperate to get back to hard facts, to emotional and intellectual solid ground, to things we are sure of. We do not like to linger too long in the land of “I don’t know.”

This reluctance is understandable. We live in a society where absolute certainty, even if it is biased, narrow-minded, or just plain incorrect, is rewarded—just turn on the television or radio and you will be barraged with countless examples of this: opinionated commentators who never waver from their rigid points of view; talk show experts who harshly preach black and white and nothing in between; reality TV contestants who win the prize, the date, the proposal or the job, often because they display the most unwavering, arrogant assuredness. Doubt, hesitation, introspection—these don’t sell. Certainty does. Is it any wonder, then, that we learn to bury our uncertainties beneath a thick covering of avoidance and denial?

Imagine going to a party and seeing an acquaintance you haven’t been in touch with for some time. “How have you been?” your friend asks. Most likely, you wouldn’t answer, “Actually, I’m confused. You see, I am in a period of deep questioning.” To confess that you are unsure or disoriented would make you feel vulnerable, insecure, exposed. To admit, even to yourself, that you are feeling lost can cause you to feel that somehow you have failed.

This is precisely what will happen when you begin to dig deep—at least in the privacy of your own heart. You will begin to question. You will begin to ask yourself, “How did I get here?” You will feel disoriented, vulnerable, even lost.

But you are not lost.

“How did I get here?” has a “here” in it. You are somewhere. Just because you may not yet understand where that somewhere is does not mean you are in the wrong place, or even necessarily off course. To arrive at a place we don’t recognize is indeed a legitimate destination in life.

A few weeks ago I met my friend Molly for coffee. I hadn’t seen her for a while, and Molly, who is a single parent with a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, proceeded to tell me about her latest crisis. Molly’s daughter had been lying to her, hanging out with some very troubled kids, and neglecting her schoolwork. “I am so stressed out,” Molly confessed. “After all I have done for Jenna, how can she treat me like this? It makes me feel like I am a bad mother and that I haven’t done a good job. And of all times—I am so swamped at work. I’ve decided I’m giving myself two days to process all of this, and then I’m putting it behind me.”

As Molly finished her story, she noticed that in spite of my best efforts to disguise it, I was smiling. “What?” she said. “I know you, Barbara, and when you get that look on your face, it means you’re about to tell me something you are seeing about my situation that I haven’t figured out yet! Come on, I can take it.”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “Actually, I was just thinking how much you remind me of myself. Throughout my life, I have always been in a rush to find the answers, to have the realizations, to get to certainty about everything. When you said that you were giving yourself two days to process your problems with Jenna, and no more, it cracked me up! It’s like insisting, ‘I will extract the lesson from this now even if it kills me!’ Whenever I have done this, it’s my way of trying to get things back under control. I am in a hurry to find solutions because I feel so uncomfortable lingering in the problems.”

Molly laughed. “You’re right. Part of me just wants to get this whole thing over with. But I know it is going to take a lot longer than two days to deal with how I am feeling. I just can’t help wishing there was a way to speed it up.”

We all know how Molly feels. After all, we live in a society defined by our hunger for instant gratification. When I enter the word “instant” into my computer’s search engine, I get 25,700,000 references, instantly, of course! From instant soup to instant replay, instant Internet connections, instant messaging, instant credit, instant face-lifts, instant erections—we want what we want now. We are impatient, not very good at waiting for long-term results and possessing little tolerance of things that take time.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could set a time limit on our trials and challenges, like those speed-dating services that offer meetings with twenty people in one evening? This would be “speed-growing”—go through your issues and learn your lessons in one day! Unfortunately, as you already know too well, this isn’t how it works.

Digging deep for wisdom isn’t something that goes quickly or can be rushed through. It is more a state of mind than a set time period during which we decide to examine our lives. The process of digging deep can last for months, even years. It requires that we stay with the questions, and that we not be in a hurry to answer them.

Digging deep for wisdom takes time because it is not simply a search for some facts or answers, but a search for the truth. Our usual skills of problem-solving, finding answers and figuring things out will not do. Digging deep requires authentic and prolonged contemplation.

Contemplation has been an integral part of the path of all great philosophers and spiritual seekers since the beginning of recorded history. The word contemplation contains the Latin root templum, meaning a piece of consecrated ground, a building (temple) of worship, a place devoted to a special and lofty purpose. The dictionary defines contemplation as “to view with continued attention.” In traditional religious understanding, contemplation is an inner communion with God, as opposed to prayer, which might be called a conversation with God.

For our purposes, we can think of contemplation as the act of paying continued attention to that special place within us from which truth, insight, revelation and enlightenment spring forth. When you dig deep for wisdom, you contemplate your questions, your unexpected challenges and your turning points, and you wait for answers. As Rilke put it in his beautiful poem, you “live the questions.”

Have you ever gazed at the night sky, hoping to see a shooting star? You stare for a long time at the twinkling constellations, the distant galaxies, and they are beautiful, but no shooting stars appear. Suddenly, just when you think your search has been in vain, you see it—a brilliant flash of light arching across the heavens. It is spectacular, and something worth waiting for.

Contemplation is slow. It takes time. It can be uncomfortable, exasperating, even painful. But if you are patient, your wait will be worth it.

Several months ago, I decided to replant a portion of my garden. I’d tried to get flowers to grow in this part of the yard, but for some reason they always died. I thought perhaps the soil needed to be weeded and turned over, and that this would help the new flowers to thrive, and so I hired a man to dig up all of the weeds and prepare the soil for planting.

The gardener began his work early one morning, but within minutes he came to the front door and asked me to look at something he’d found while digging. “See this?” he said pointing into the freshly dug hole. “These are the old roots of a tree that must have been here at one time. It was a big tree, because these roots go very deep and spread out for ten feet in each direction. No wonder you had a hard time getting things to grow.”

There is an old saying: “Dig deep enough and you will hit something.” Usually we hit something we didn’t know was there, something unexpected. There are many things within you waiting to be discovered like the old roots buried beneath the soil in my garden. Perhaps some are roots of old emotional issues that you did not know existed, ones that have been keeping you blocked that you can now dig out and remove. Others are rare, important treasures, excavated from the depths of your being, priceless gems of understanding and clarity that, once revealed, will change you forever.

Digging deep for wisdom means being willing to unearth anything and everything you find inside yourself. It means digging until you discover precious treasures of insight, revelation and awakening, that which transforms you, that which you could have never known was there unless you were forced to dig.

In my first year of college, I began practicing daily meditation, and soon after I attended a six-month meditation intensive with a renowned spiritual master in order to become a meditation teacher myself. The course consisted of some lectures, studies and yoga, but the core of the process was meditating for up to twelve hours a day. I’d always had profound experiences meditating for twenty minutes at a time and never found it challenging, but this was different. Sitting in meditation for this many hours was like taking the biggest shovel in existence and digging deep, deep, deep within myself. I would be fine for the first half-hour, but then I would hit a roadblock of thoughts and emotions that seemed to prevent me from going deeper. “I must be doing this wrong,” I would think to myself in a panic. “Maybe I should get up for a while, and then start over when I am more relaxed.” The truth was that I was terrified to go deeper. What if I found out something about myself I didn’t like? What if I didn’t have a core of peace and happiness inside?

My teacher was a wonderful storyteller with a compassionate, joyful presence. He took great delight in the tales he told us, as if he himself had never heard them before. Every evening after our long day of meditation and study, he would gather us together to sit with him, and for several hours he would share his wisdom, answer questions, and of course tell marvelous stories.

One night a young man stood up and complained that he had been feeling restless and distracted during meditation, as I had, and he confessed that whenever this happened, he would get up, walk to the store in the nearby village, read through some magazines, and then when he felt less agitated, he would walk back and sit down again to meditate. When my teacher heard this, he laughed and laughed as if he’d never heard anything so amusing in his life. When he finally stopped laughing, he shared this story with us, his version of a classic ancient parable. Here it is as I remember it:

Once there was a farmer who was in desperate need of water to save his crops from dying. The drought had lasted for several years, and so with no hope of rain, he decided to dig a well. He began digging, and hour by hour the hole got deeper and deeper, but still no there was no water to be found. “I must be digging in the wrong spot,” he concluded at the end of the day, “for all I’ve discovered in this hole are rocks and tree roots.” Exhausted and discouraged, he returned home.

The next morning, shovel in hand, the farmer began digging again, this time in a different spot. As the sun blazed overhead and he dug deeper, again he found no water. “This second hole is as bad as the first,” he muttered to himself as he climbed out of the dry hole as the sun was setting.

Day after day the farmer dug one hole after another, and each time he would get the same results—no water. And as he laid down his shovel and walked home, head hung low, he would wonder if he was crazy to believe there was any water to be found. “Am I doomed to spend my life digging and finding nothing?” he moaned to himself. “I must be cursed in some way.”

One day a traveling wise man was passing by the farmer’s plot of land. To his surprise, he saw the farmer, shovel in hand, digging a hole surrounded by twenty similar holes.

“What are you doing, my friend?” the wise man asked the farmer, who was knee-deep in dirt.

“I’m digging a well—at least, I’m trying to.” the farmer replied in a forlorn voice. “But so far, I have only had horrible luck, for I keep hitting rocks and roots—everything but water.”

“Dear sir, you will never find water digging that way!” the wise man said kindly.

“What other way is there?” asked the farmer.

“Your efforts at digging are valiant, but they are not working,” explained the wise man. “You start digging in one place, and after ten feet when you don’t find water, you stop, go to another place, and start to dig all over again. However, the water table in this village starts at least twenty feet below the surface.”

“Unless you dig longer and deeper, you won’t find what you are searching for. Stay in one place, dig down deep and don’t stop when you get discouraged. Be patient and just keep digging, even when you hit the hard rock-filled soil. If you persist, I promise you will find the water you seek.”

Again and again throughout my life, I have returned to the important lesson contained in this story. Digging deep for wisdom means not giving up when you hit the rocks of discomfort and frustration within yourself. It means being patient and persistent, not stopping at the first insight, the first revelation, the first breakthrough, but going even deeper. It means having trust—that beneath all of your questions and confusion there are answers, there is clarity, there is awakening.