As winter’s quiet chill give rise to longer days and brilliant blooms, we suddenly find ourselves in the throes of a new season of life. Spring is here, and for many of us this time of year, there are few rites more satisfying than the annual tidying of our personal space. The purging of our overstuffed drawers and closets. The organizing of our external world.
And yet spring, with all its restorative and regenerative energy, is also an excellent time to tend to our inner worlds. Our personal wardrobes. Our interior closets. The ones filled to bursting with the beliefs, opinions, platforms and agendas we’ve spent a lifetime collecting and preserving, despite fleeting fads, changing trends and, at times, even our own better judgment.
These closets often feel scary to pull apart because when we do, there is a very real possibility we might not like what we find. Questioning the things we “know for sure” takes real courage because the stakes are high: What if our beliefs don’t fit as well as we originally thought? What if we’ve invested so much in our current positions that adjusting course would cause too much embarrassment, guilt or shame to bear? What if we have to let some beliefs go without the promise that sufficient “replacement beliefs” are on their way to fill the gaps in our wardrobes? What would happen then?
We might have to start saying “I don’t know” more often.
Because truth, it turns out, doesn’t dwell in absolutes. It lives and breathes and thrives in our acceptance of the unresolved. And most often, it is actually our misguided desire to know the truth that ends up leaving us too closed off to seek it.
So today friends, let’s not be afraid to pull those trusty staples from our own interior closets and hold them up to the light. To give ourselves permission to examine them. To question them. To consider them from a different angle.
And after all this, should we decide to put our original notions back into our wardrobes, let’s do so with great peace, knowing that doubt actually made our belief stronger. And if we should decide to discard our beliefs because they no longer fit, let’s also do so with great peace, knowing that we are different people today than we were yesterday.
I had missed these bites!!! And I will have to say that I will need to chew on this one more than the others. I am not sure how I feel about doubting. I do reevaluate and reconfirm. On the big stuff in life, I have gone through the doubt process, one I don’t think I need to repeat. But I do appreciate the foundation of what you are saying. One more thing…please remember your faithful readers who live in the southern hemisphere and are in fall instead of spring. Just sayin’!!!
So what you’re saying is it’s time to start doubting how you feel about doubting… 😉