What do you have the hardest time giving?

Answers to questions like: What changed in your life? What was your process, exactly? What steps did you take? How did you get from there to here?

Around the beginning of the end of our relationship, my ex used to say, accusingly: You’re changing. I’m not, I would protest. I really didn’t feel it, didn’t know what he meant, not on a conscious level. Later still, he told me once, with tears in his voice: You’re going somewhere and you’re not taking me with you. Now, several years after we split up, he begs me to let him in on my secret: Please tell me, I want to go there too.

I try, I honestly do, to share what I can of my process, even though he interrupts me time and again with little resistances: I don’t believe in god, I don’t this, I don’t that. You don’t have to believe anything, I’ll say to him. You just have to open yourself up to you. Change is an inside job. It's not a veneer that can be applied on the outside, as if by some contract house painter you hire.

This is the thing, these internal processes sometimes defy being spoken about in human physical languages. And perhaps there’s a reason for that. I might say something like: it started with the two most important people in my life dying unexpectedly when they (and I) were in their late twenties to mid thirties. But then again, those were only triggers, weren’t they? And in a manner of speaking, I summed up everything that matters in my 6-word memoir. But as to specifics of the path I took (or that took me)? The process is an internal one, and therefore a unique and individual one for each seeker. If I could tell you exactly what I did, what happened, how I got out of that into this, etc, you might think, oh, if I do that I’ll get there too. No. You have your own path, your own way, the trick is not to follow what someone else has done, it’s to follow what your heart is urging you to do. Go within, that's where the answer lies.

Whoever Brought Me Here

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

—Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)