How a jeweler's simple question of my ring size forced me to confront whether my lifestyle and priorities were still right for me.
“You want to know it won’t slip off your finger when you put your hand in a running stream,”
he said, one hand in the pocket of his well-worn Carhartt overalls, the other dangling in air as if feeling the cool water on his dancing fingers.
That was the kind of life he lived. Where dipping one’s hands into a running stream was commonplace; so common it was a considerable thought when it came to sizing a wedding ring. How nonchalant he’d said it, with the very idea of everyday concern. Why wouldn’t you think first of that, when thinking of sizing your wedding ring? Just as important as it not slipping off when you apply lotion or go for a jog.
It’s moments like these; when someone else’s normalcy puts in stark contrast our own circumstances, that life is using words to expose doorways. Portals. Invitations to complete awareness of what you are now, and where you might go. The jeweler was only giving practical example, but inadvertently had asked an important question: What is of everyday concern to you? What simple abilities do you need on a daily basis? Does the life you live, and the things you worry about, align with what you want and who you have become?
Do the things you have easy access to reflect the priorities you now hold? Or have you outgrown them?
I do not live the kind of life where I might dip my hand into running, cool streams. I do not have access nor time to reach into creeks and frolic with nature’s abandon. My home is surrounded by concrete with concrete buildings on top of it. The only running water I see are streams of rainwater on the side of the city streets when LA floods post-storm, and the occasional trip to the beach. Beach trips I promise, year after year, to do more frequently. Even if he had said “you want it secure enough to dive into the waves without worry” I would have thought: I’d like to worry about that more often.
Sometimes, the very place we have run from is the only place we can find ourselves. What we promised had never felt like home and never would reveals itself to be the only place we can come home to ourselves. As in a previous post, we can run as fast and as far as we’d like, but we will inevitably end up stuck in place, or if we’re lucky, back where we started so we can finally heal.
I promised myself I’d never come back here. But the self that made that promise had a much narrower view of the world. The further away I went and the faster I ran from this home, the quicker I ended up right back at the beginning. As if it were a circle I had run the entire track of, decades of self and global exploration led me back to the first person I’d ever fallen in love with, and the inevitable truth that here in this self-imposed forbidden land was the only place I could have everything I wanted: a husband and kids and a warm place to call home. Everything I was certain I’d find elsewhere could only be built here.
And it wasn’t just these tangibles puzzle pieces of a life well lived, either Here was the only place I could heal the deep wounds of a childhood bullying and it’s subsequent conclusions of unworthiness and un-wantedness. The very place that had convinced me I was too weird was the only place I could finally show up, in my complete weirdness, and in doing so finally see the magic of that exact quality. It was only here that I could (and had to) realize that regardless of where I am, I am always whole and lovable and belonged. Because in the hardest places - the places we don’t want to go or are scared to go in our minds, in our jobs, in our relationships, in social groups or our own painful memories, the very places we fear will hold our rejection are the very places that hold our liberation. By finding the courage to enter those places, we free ourselves of our own fear. Then, even if we are rejected by other people, it doesn’t matter. Because we know we are safe in the place of home we have built in ourselves, a home we can take with us wherever we want to go.
So now, while he asked again what size I’d like my ring to be, I was asking myself: at this season of my life, could the running stream be more important to me than the city lights? Could the presence and ability to put my hands in the currents of nature right in my own backyard matter to me more than a new restaurant or outfit or my flashy LA lifestyle? Was it time to redefine what I had access to, and what had access to me, in order to say I am home?
We went with a size 6.75. Over a size smaller than I had predicted. Turns out, I can be mistaken and thus be resized in a great many ways.
