A few years ago, on my rush hour commute to the night shift, I slowly drove past orange construction signs that read “Shifts Ahead.” The road crew had placed a sign every couple miles along my route to work because they were widening the roads and reorienting the lanes. I was thrilled every time I saw these signs. The road work lasted for months, but no matter how many times I read “Shifts Ahead” I always breathed a sigh and shook my head in agreement. I felt seen by those large hexagonal messengers. Strange, yes to feel understood by a road sign. It was a message - a truth that shifts were ahead. Life was reverberating back to me what I already knew: that the changes rapidly happening in my life were going to keep coming, dressed in the deep, bright, sometimes heart-breaking colors of death and rebirth. To take the construction metaphor further, life was saying to me “Your lines are going to be redrawn. You are expanding.” The world we live in now is changing irreversibly, upheaving and reordering itself. It is a time of revolution, of recalibration. Shifts are ahead for everyone.
The Talmud says, “Wherever you look, there is something to be seen.” If you look just right, everything speaks to you. Not always through block letters clearly written on bright orange backgrounds. But life does speak. In waves of grief that come off a woman who just stopped crying in her car and now stands behind me in the grocery line. In deep thrums of peace from the calm couple talking at the table next to me. In the clear buzz of the fly as it spins in circles around my head, bringing me back to the present moment. In the cries of protest and anger that rise from the collective. These big and small moments are messages. Gifts of wisdom. I seek to love them all, no matter the appearance, and hold them in my heart as fuel for each next action I take.
We often look for guidance everywhere but here, in anytime but Now. We go to therapists for help unraveling the messages of our emotions. We attend church to reach for higher realms and to understand the truths of ancient gods. We read books to find reprieve from our endlessly repeating, often unwanted, thought patterns. What I have discovered is that we are surrounded by all the wisdom and guidance we’ll ever need right now. Every decision we make, every person we encounter, every task we complete (or don’t complete) hold within them what we need to see and understand. Susan Sarandon’s character, in a movie that I can’t name at the moment, says something like, “What I want in a relationship is to be witnessed, to be seen for who I am.” This is what life wants also - to be seen. One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and others is to become observers of life. When we see what is before us, when we take it into our hearts and feel it fully, we expand. And in that expansion, we can respond more wisely, love more deeply. We can walk with courage toward the shifts ahead of us.