the end of the tunnel

Until this week, I was getting very impatient with my progress in connecting with people in London. Though I can be somewhat introverted, I’m very outgoing when I want to be, and that’s how most people see me. So I was a bit surprised at the slow rate of making connections after four months here. I do have a handful of wonderful people around me, a couple of whom I’d say are close. But it takes more than a handful of people to feel at home.

I’m not working at a job at the moment, so that takes away a major source of establishing a sense of belonging to a group. Instead I’ve been focusing on being open and attentive to what life is asking me to do here. I’m operating on the assumption that there’s some important purpose for me in this place and I have yet to bring it into focus. So a big part of my initial exploration has to do with finding the people with whom I need to fulfill this purpose, the people who will teach me what I need to learn, and who will work with me toward that purpose. My tribe.

This week my outlook changed. I’ve been preparing to tell a true story at a small theater in London as part of my quest to use my voice more, both literally and metaphorically. I finally did it this week and the experience of doing that seems to have indeed opened an avenue for me to be with that tribe. I felt so at home there, with the storytellers and with the audience. I met and talked to the people I was looking for and had not found up to this point.

It’s impossible to say what makes one feel a sense of belonging. It may be a combination of doing what one absolutely must do at a certain moment, like tell my story, while being with people who felt a similar need to converge at the same time and space.

It’s been such a fuzzy time in my life. It’s like feeling around in the dark for the right road, the corridor that will lead into an opening where everything will be clear and my mission will be in focus. I suspect that this was a necessary period of stillness and darkness, where I was forced to just be with myself.  I was the company I kept, the counsel I sought, the comfort I needed. A gestation period. And though it felt like it would never end, thankfully it was finite.

That one moment of using my voice, and the meetings, emails, ideas, and activities I was led to as a natural progression from that event, feels like it led me out of that dark tunnel, into a clearing. The paths and roads are endless, and who knows where I’ll end up. But the possibilities are visible, brightly lit, optimistic.

Maybe it’s just that taking one action that brings out the brightness inside you makes the world outside seem bright and hopeful.