Each week in The Wisdom of Change blog series, I share the original artwork and unpack the insights and meaning behind one of the 44 cards in The Wisdom of Change oracle deck.
This week’s card is 34: Beautiful Conclusions
‘Endings are as powerful and beautiful as beginnings’
As I write, the first line on the card Beautiful Conclusions is a perfectly timed reminder for me.
We are two thirds through our fourth academic year living as British Expats in Dubai. We are ‘cocooned’ in our villa, practising social distancing; only venturing out for food and to walk the dog. The children have completed their first week of home schooling and my husband has just lost his job. Like everyone on the planet, our plans have changed. Chaos and uncertainty at a personal level is nestled amidst global chaos and uncertainty.
Faced with the imminent prospect of repatriation in the midst of a global pandemic, complexity and ‘dead ends’ meet us on a daily basis as we try to make sense of the path ahead and the options available to us. Our life and the world shifts and before we have had a chance to digest the ramifications of that, another wave of change in our operating environment offers to incite fear and drag us under.
And yet I feel strangely calm.
It’s so apparent to me that I have two choices in any given moment; to succumb to panic or to surrender to ‘what is’. The extent to which I can do the latter is directly proportionate to the amount of ‘pain’ I will feel.
It’s as though I’ve had a dress rehearsal for this point in humanity. The lessons that inspired me to create the deck in the first place are serving me again now.
When the words for this card were first channelled, I was being invited to let go of so many things that I had held dear and that I believed would be constants in my life for the foreseeable future. My career, my relationships, my childless years, my income, my home, the way I worked and my belief systems were being challenged and then falling away. Drama after drama showed up in my life as I gamely braced myself against each blow and tried desperately to hang on to what had once been. I spent days at a time in bed sobbing and stressing and questioning why; raking over and over what I could have done wrong to deserve such a relentless onslaught of hardship and heartbreak in every area of my life.
I tried to work out how to fix it; to search for ways to scrape up all the pieces and put it all back together. I tried to ignore it, push through it all and stay busy. I ventured into victim mentality and searched for ways to make myself, other people and society wrong. In essence, I was holding on tight. I fought the changes. I didn’t know I needed to let it all fall away. I became increasingly more desperate and exhausted physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The more I struggled, the worse it got until one day, after yet another personal drama, I looked up to the sky and implored; ‘seriously, are you effing kidding me right now?!’ ‘What more do you want from me?!’
I wonder how many of us can relate to this in our current reality!
Eventually after all the fighting and attempts to fix and control everything, I got the message. Because nothing I did was working and because I had pretty much nothing left to hang on to, I finally let go. I had run out of things to try. What had worked before was working no more. I had no choice but to stop, to surrender and listen.
By that time, I was homeless. I had just experienced a house fire at the friend’s house where I had been staying for a while to plan ‘where next’ and all my belongings lay smoke damaged in a burnt-out mobile home. Salvaging only the barest essentials needed to live and thanking god my children were safe, we moved temporarily into social housing in the UK. I felt so much shame.. I felt like a failure and a fraud. It was the start of January 2014. I was a single mother to two small children. My income streams stubbornly refused to offer any security. The flat was unfurnished except for beds and a tiny table with three chairs. There was no TV and I had no internet connection. The children were at school and I sat staring blankly out of the window onto the chilly streets of Stratford Upon Avon.
I was at rock bottom and I had never felt so calm.
I didn’t know it yet, but finally my life was poised for a period of deep healing, recovery and growth.
I’d love to tell you that I’d had the foresight to see that surrender was what was required of me, but I did not. I had to learn the hard way. As humans we are so comfortable with birth and new beginnings; we love life and growth and progress. We are deeply uncomfortable with endings and the death part of the cycle; both literal and metaphorical. This is especially true when we don’t feel in control of it and we weren’t consciously ready for something to end. And yet the cycle of birth, life, death, repeat is as nature intended; necessary periodically and repeatedly throughout our lives.
As Covid-19 runs its course throughout the globe, humanity en masse is being offered exactly the same opportunity; to experience the ‘conclusion’ of things. The extent to which the conclusion of things are ‘beautiful’ is up to us. We are experiencing a global reset. We are being invited to answer questions about what is really important; to recognise what we no longer need, to establish what no longer serves us…and to allow it to fall away.
If it serves you, I invite you to consider what I am currently pondering on a daily basis …
What is wanting to beautifully conclude itself in my life?
What needs to fall away to lighten my load for the journey ahead?
What can I let go of with gratitude for all it has taught me as the world resets itself and before we all move on?
I’m sending you so much love and best wishes for everything that is concluding beautifully for you at this time.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s connection to your inner wisdom.
As always, I’d love to hear your comments below.
If you’d like to learn more about The Wisdom of Change oracle deck you can find out more here.
If you'd like to find out more about a Wisdom of Change reading with Wendy please click here.