We have been disoriented.

Ours is a willful, chosen disorientation, but we are befuddled none the less.

We have moved 1500 hundred miles.

We have flipped our climate from temperate-rainy-sea level to high desert extremous.

We now are tri-generational cohabitants.

We traded a solid middle-class income with benefits for temporary voluntary poverty and one of us is experimenting with being self-insured for health care.

We decreased our personal possessions by 80% in under a year.

We also cut the square footage of space we live in by 80%.

The totality of this is more than unsettling.

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Yet we are so blessed to be able to have made these choices ourselves.

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Because there are so many ways to get disoriented. Many of them do not ask your consent.

And some of them are hellacious.  Unchosen loss, sudden loss, gradual but relentlessly dissipating loss.

• Ø  You lose someone you loved more than life.
• Ø  You lose your health - or lose your marbles
• Ø  You lose your ability to meet your own needs
• Ø  You lose your relationship
• Ø  You lose your faith
• Ø  You lose your community
• Ø  You lose a possibly false, but comforting, sense of security
• Ø  You lose your nest
• Ø  Some horrible combination of the above

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And you find yourself: rocked, unsteady, discombobulated, dismembered, bereft, in shock, raw, confused, disoriented.

And maybe you want to know how to get back to the ground you were on.

Is it even possible?

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Sadly, the answer is no. You will never again be that person that you were.

Disruption changes you.

And the possible choices may look like oblivion, perma-numb, walking wounded and/or re-orientation.

Re-orientation is very hard work.  Depending on the magnitude of change, it is long work.

But fortunately, it is the path to stability and growth.

The next post on this blog will describe a process of finding a new center.

The Spiritual Discipline of Re-Orientation, if you can handle that language.

OR

A behavioral and psychological process of re-rooting, and regaining vigor, if you cannot.