These past few weeks have been a time of great transition in my life. Graduating from Notre Dame. Moving to Chicago to start a new job. But the hardest of these transitions has been discerning whether to leave or stay in what I thought was a long-term relationship.
A friend - with whom I recently had the joy of reconnecting with -- put this on facebook just a few days before we met up, and at a time when I was particularly struggling with the decision:
"Porta itineris dicitur longissima esse" -
the door is the longest part of the journey.
In my discernment, I have tried praying novenas to get an answer; nothing has surfaced - yet. While I am willing to forgive and work at the relationship, I also realize that I have to be true to myself. These past few weeks apart have not been as sad as I thought they would be. Instead, I've had time to reconnect with myself and with my deepest passions, passions which I thought I shared with this person, but which I have come to realize were never there in the way that I had hoped. With this realization, I've felt free to explore the expansive city around me, even if at times doing so reminds me of my loneliness.
Although things did not turn out the way I expected, I find myself reflective and grateful more than anything. Grateful for what I learned about life, about love, about myself. Grateful for the love that I received and the ways that this made me grow. I only have a few small regrets, which I realize have been the seeds of new insight and new wisdom, and I suppose if I had the chance to go back and do it all over again, I might have changed very little.
And so I believe that starting today - I am walking across the threshhold of that door and into a whole new realm of possibility. I know that the journey ahead will be filled with little moments of sadness, but also filled with hope.
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