The Biggest “Coming of Age” Challenge
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, as the popular saying goes, to figure out that we live in a society that offers schismatic believe systems on many levels. One of the biggest “coming of age” challenges involved the facing, in the course of a well-lived life, the realization that there are no happy endings.
I found myself reminded of this in a more full-force way through my own personal crises on a couple of fronts over this past week, which had repeated their basic scenarios over many years, and once again presented current challenges demanding immediate resolution. This coupled with seeing the well-reviewed movie, “Becoming Jane”, a reportedly excellently researched, but questionable and fictionally embellished, biography of a possible flaming romance in Jane Austen’s early life.
The Miraculous Promise of Fairy Tales Thwarted
The next day I attended, for the first time ever (it only took me forty years after graduating!) my high school reunion, where I heard many more stories about my peers’ triumphs, tragedies, and ongoing life challenges. Of course I was also terribly struck by how over middle-aged (I’m being kind here) everyone looked and sounded, particularly as we were all given name tags to wear that were our high school yearbook pictures, so there was no doubt about the striking difference in comparing “faces”, present and past.
We hear everywhere about necessary happy endings in life. Isn’t that what popular fairy tales promise? After great struggle and life-threatening adventures, the final resolution all, we are assured, comes out miraculously and wonderfully.
Real Resolution That Our Hearts Can Live With
I offer you a translation of this promise to better transcend the schism between what we’re conditioned to believe and desperately hope for in our well-lived lives, and what we typically experience. My only solution is to interpret the promise as a metaphor.
An end that brings its own integral acceptance is the end that comes through fully experiencing all the stages of grief; beginning with denial and moving wholly through the subsequent stages of bargaining, anger, helplessness and hopelessness to this final stage that offers its own organic forgiveness. The “happy ending” then, is a resolution that our heart of hearts can live with peacefully and freely.
Our Primary Divine Driective
I daresay it is never what we initially hope for, even, in our most desperate moments, demand. The ironclad guarantee, though, is that the “ending” to these poignant chapters of our lives will centrally yield key self-healing and spiritual development that will recreate us as an ever-evolving being of light consciousness.
That, after all, is our primary divine directive. Slogging it out on the earth plane, though, through the many ups and downs of our lives, we’re more than entitled to express all our understandable feelings of the moment.
Become
That is the only way we can stay present with being fully present, which is the foundation that brings the gifts of personal growth and empowerment. It is, of course, how we transform, or, as the movie about Jane Austen states, become.