Spirituality

I went to bed last night with the intent of riding my bike this morning. Over the past few months, I’ve been able to sleep 5-6 hours on average. I usually get up once during the night for about 30 minutes or so after a couple of hours, grab a small snack before crashing for a few more hours. Last night, I went to bed around 12:30, woke up at 2:00, and ate a small piece of cake left over from the get-together we had Sunday night. I lay back down around 2:30 and just stared at the ceiling. I was wide awake until about 5:00. It was then that I knew the ride wasn’t going to happen, so I took some melatonin and slept until about 9:30.

When I awoke, I was covered in depression and anxiety. I wanted to pull the covers over my head and sleep forever. I started thinking about getting a studio apartment where I could isolate myself from the rest of the world. I wanted to run away. This is a very common feeling almost any morning when I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep the night before. Conversely, when I feel somewhat rested and can hop out of bed without thinking, I will usually grab my gear and get out on my bike. It’s as if I dodge the grief or trauma, somehow suppressing it until it all resurfaces at some point during my bike ride.

Usually by the time it hits me though, I’m already moving. This seems to help it sort itself out while I’m on the road. I also often go through periods early in my rides where I’m ready to stop, but I have found that if I can just push through that early threshold, the endorphins kick in and carry me over the top. Restless nights do not seem to offer that same luxury.

I believe fear is at the root of all of this.

Fear of the future. Fear of being able to move forward in life. Fear of mornings like today. Fear of assimilating back into society. Fear of ever being vulnerable enough again to allow another woman into my heart. I often wonder how I’ll ever be able to have a normal life again when I can’t seem to sustain a few days of consistency. I fear so many things that I suspect most people never even think about. It’s daunting, really.

On a morning like today, I will eventually get out of bed and go through the motions of fixing coffee and taking a shower, and at some point, I will break down to the point where the fear will shift to a place of complete fearlessness. For me, it feels like an emotional bungee cord, one moment completely free-falling before suddenly being snapped up into the clouds.

I believe I have seen the worst life has to offer. I feel as if everything I once valued has been taken from me. Coming to this realization puts me in a place where the only thing that matters is my connection to the universe and to God, so in those moments of fearlessness, I feel ready to throw complete caution to the wind. I often want to drop everything and just drive across the country in an attempt to find what this thing called life is all about, to find myself. What’s the worst that could really happen? Haven’t I already experienced the most heinous thing imaginable?

Sometimes, I look around and see how we humans seem to be conditioned to accept certain aspects of society. It’s like we’ve been hard-wired to believe this or that. I must have the house, the car, the kids and the picket fence, and if I don’t have that I’ll be unhappy.

I had all of those things once. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but I did have an amazing wife, a beautiful daughter, a nice home, a car, and a budding career. Nothing in my life was completely perfect, but it was really good. I was actually looking for a place on the beach after having just begun what promised to be a lucrative career the day before Shani’s death. I feel confident in saying that we were managing pretty damn well.

And then….BOOM! It was all shattered. Everything was destroyed. Everything.

I’m not going to go too in-depth about my personal spirituality or try to impose my beliefs on anyone else. I’m certainly not going to judge anyone, because my basic beliefs are rooted in acceptance and the idea that “whatever gets you there” is okay. What I do believe is that a personal relationship with a God of your own understanding is the most valued possession any of us truly has. I’m sure I will talk a lot more about this moving forward with this blog. For now though, just know that my spirituality is the most important part of my life and has been the prime source of my strength and healing over the last year.

I’ve written about the library of books Shani accumulated over the years, most of them based in the Eastern philosophies. I’ve also written about how I’ve developed my practice of yoga over the past few years. Shani fought her own way through dealing with the loss of her mother when she was twenty-one and left me a blueprint, of sorts, of how to face my own horrors through this experience.  I learned so much from her that I am now using to simply make it through my day.

Without my spirituality, I believe I'd be dead by now. If I had no belief in God, in a higher power of some sort, a universal guiding source, how could I even being to make sense of all of this? It would be so much easier to dive into the material excesses of this world, completely lose myself, and just check out. I can’t do that though.

So, eventually, when my fear subsides, I try to connect spiritually. I try to find a way to let go. I have to have the belief that I am being carried to a better place. I have to.  To me, this is what true surrender is all about. When I do reach this place though, I look around and feel alone. I feel invisible.

I try not to judge anyone for living their lives the way they do. Everyone has the right to find happiness in whatever path they choose and the decisions they make along the way, given whatever set of circumstances they are given. All I’m really saying is that when you’re stripped of everything that matters to you in the material world and you get to the place where you don’t feel connected to anything but God, that’s the place of truth. When I find myself there, I understand that this experience is mine and mine alone. I have found people to relate to along the way, but in the general course of my day, I feel completely alone.

In my experience, my spirituality has been essential. At times, it really is all I have. It seems that we tend to build our spirituality around our lives instead of the other way around. It’s much more convenient to live our lives that way than to actually build our lives around what we say that we believe. We hate and judge the things we don’t understand, which I believe is a nearly perfect definition of ignorance. It ends up being all about ego. It’s about being right without understanding, because it’s what we’ve been taught. We take the easiest route rather than truly investigating what it is we choose to believe.

Today, thanks to a rough night of sleep and a missed bike ride, I happen to find myself in that place of surrender, and while it’s comforting to be able to let go, it’s also a very lonely place to be sometimes. They say there’s “beauty in the breakdown.” If that’s the case, I should be the on the cover of GQ. I just hope that at some point, with some time behind me, I’ll find that balance where I can surf the waves of today’s society while maintaining the spiritual connection I’ve gained in all of this.

Today though, I’d just assume be alone.