1. Two Paths

It was March of 2020. The brink of the global pandemic. The whole world had just come to a screeching halt. Everything was about to change. At the time, I didn’t know exactly how things were going to be different, I just knew they were going to be a lot harder.

I also knew that I wasn’t prepared. I’m not talking about material preparation. In that way, we had our bases covered. I’m talking about emotional preparation, spiritual preparation, SELF preparation. In all those ways, I was totally and completely fucked.

I had been neglecting my SELF, (if not going to all out war), for quite some time, and had arrived at point in which I had no mental fortitude, no stamina, no resiliency and no reserves, even though I was in decent physical shape.

My inner world, the place in which we all really live our lives, was in complete disarray. And I knew that this new life, this pandemic life, was going to require a lot more from me than I had been expecting from my SELF.

I was going to need to change, and not just a little. I was going to need to radically alter the way I had been relating to my SELF. And, I was going to need to do it quickly.

And so, just like that, I decided to change.

(Well, not “just like that.” Radical change of any kind never happens “just like that.” But my decision to change felt like it happened “just like that.”)

I know the exact moment in which I made the decision.

We had just pulled up to our family cottage and were about to begin a whole new way of co-existing as a family when a fork in the road presented itself to me. More specifically, two dirt paths etched into a grassy knoll appeared before me like a vision in the sky.

I thought to my SELF: There are two different paths here. I can keep going down the same path I’ve been on for the last couple of decades and continue barrelling towards SELF destruction, (bringing my whole family down with me), or I can choose the other path.

At the time, I didn’t know what the other path had in store for me, I just knew it had to be preferable to the one I was on. But, most of all, I knew it had to be better for my family.

And so, on the day we brought all our stuff up from our home in Toronto to settle into a quieter, calmer, less populated existence on Georgian Bay, I decided I would bring my SELF (I had no other choice) but I wouldn’t bring our old relationship with me.

I would forge a new, kinder, more compassionate relationship to my SELF, and I would do so in the midst of a global pandemic.

TWO PATHS