Reflecting upon experiences recently, I wondered at my steadiness. I didn’t feel it. I felt shaken, maybe even stirred. I just wasn’t sure. So you see? I wasn’t rock solid, and I’d have to confess that I may not yet be rock solid. I certainly don’t feel it. And yet…

The other week I was speaking with an old friend of mine and he reminded me of sage advice I’d meted out to him a few years earlier. “Sometimes we just feel beaten, but we know it isn’t true. The trouble we have is shaking that feeling, and to be true to who and what we are. I understood finally, after years of not understanding, ‘fake it till you make it.’ It means to really feel it, that juice that you felt when you were having a peak experience. The only way there was to recall the memory, to pull that memory so fully into the present that you remember what it felt like. Now hang onto that feeling, because it is you too. Fake it till you make it.” And he did.

Still wondering, I realized that even though I feel shaky, I also feel a certain confidence. This confidence is in something larger than myself, and I can’t quite explain that to you. I think it is something we each have to come to on our own. Even so, another thought also expressed itself in those wondering moments that held a great deal of promise for the future, and yielded beautiful insight to the past: I’m not rock solid.

Like Stanley Park after the wind-storms ravaged her forests, the man that I was has been stripped bare. What once stood mighty and strong is now exposed and vulnerable. It remains that way as the new growth, young saplings, define the character of the new tomorrow. Relying fully on the anchor that remained through it all, that barrenness greets the hardships honing and shaping with the friction of life that bears fruit.

Vulnerable, I remain…. maybe 😉