You Will Know When You Know
‘You’ll know when you know,’ my dear friend used to say to me during the rough patches.
Some days I could make perfect sense of that. I mean, I could say to myself ‘well I sure don’t know today, so today must not be the day’. But there were others that just weren’t as easy. I didn’t want to wait until the answers were mysteriously in front of me. I wanted them now. Later maybe I wouldn’t even care about the answers, but now I do. It was those days that I barely trusted the concept. I barely even trusted it was an actual concept.
I wanted to know now, so I could take the knowledge and move on it. Now. I’m not the wallowing type. I’m not the one that sits in a dark room and worries all night long. No, I’m the one that figures out what’s wrong, and then makes the appropriate changes in hopes of resolution. But how could I make changes day in and day out, while waiting for some mysterious sign?
Through a crazy, unexpected 10-year journey, I learned all about signs and waiting. What I discovered was that there aren’t signs that suddenly neither erupt from the ground, or lower from the sky, nor are there single file lines. I have seen first hand that instead there are deep feelings within all of us that are missed due to our obsessions with what is next. Rather than standing still and actually listening to our intuition…that little voice inside our head or that deep sensation in our stomach, we choose to ignore it.
I was reminded of this when my fiancé walked in the door last night with those glazed over eyes. Not the eyes of a tired man at 8:45pm needing dinner, but eyes that seem to look into my soul. Eyes that look at me as if for the very first time, with a deep sense of gratefulness that I can just barely grasp. Eyes that make me smile, because who wouldn’t smile feeling that loved?
“We did it,” he said quite calmly over my shoulder, as I searched to recall what we were trying to do, he explained. “We got our love to work. We didn’t give up and now…it just works.”
I knew then just what he meant, as I had been climbing into bed each night with the exact same feeling of calm. A feeling like my life had come full circle and finally, what I felt on the inside, surrounded me in my life on the outside. Felt like a miracle of sorts. Like seeing your baby’s eyes stare into yours for the very first time. It was the kind of calm that was so quiet you could almost hear your heartbeat. There were no little voices, no emotions running amok…just a quiet, calm, peacefulness.
“We sure did,” I said. But it wasn’t easy, in fact it was painful at times, many times, but we were present to all of it, doing our best to listen to our intuition. We yelled when couldn’t hold it in, cried when we needed, and loved ever so passionately in the face of our fears. We huddled together and then walked away, all the while wondering when we would ‘know’. It wasn’t until we committed to splitting up, that our intuitions took a death grip on our hearts. It wasn’t until then, that we truly got quiet and knew. We knew we needed time to heal from our first lives, and that we needed to break the pattern of what we had grown to know as love. Yet we also had learned to understand and accept our differences; the way we organized a desk, ran our work day, or even hung our dirty clothes, and that that was just stuff. Not the stuff that drew us together in the first place.
What drew us together in the first place was simply a feeling way down deep. A feeling that was often hard to describe.
I knew it almost 7 years ago when he held me in his arms for the first time and my entire world grew silent with his heartbeat against mine. “Heart to heart,” as he always says. I knew it even as our fears grew, and worries intensified…but chose not to listen.
What I now know is that we weren’t waiting at all, but in fact listening to that inner voice and following the flow of our journey. I know now that all of it, the good and the hard, were all necessary to get us to this point. I know now that we are only able to begin our life journey together because it is impossible not to listen to that voice as our hearts and laughter beat in sync in a way that I never thought possible…
You will know when you know. The question is: will you listen when you hear it?