Have you ever had a feeling about something so deeply it was a certainty? Maybe it was about a person, or a place, or a destination, or you knew that something was around the next corner. You couldn't put your finger on it yet, but all you could do was feel like the observer in your own life as events played out.
One of the times when I experienced this was when I went to Boise, Idaho for six months. I had been working at a trucking company, going to college, living with a couple guys in an apartment. They were both dating people (who would later be their wives), and I was just out there, dangling somewhere. Between work and school, I felt disconnected, alone. I knew something had to change. I didn't know how to get there.
Then came the night around Thanksgiving when all the college guys were pulled off the dock and called into the office. Tonight was our last night (they told us this AFTER a 12-hour shift), we wouldn't need to come in next weekend, and they'd let us know if they needed us?
A tall guy named Scott who had just bought a truck said, "So does that mean a month, a couple weeks?"
"No, Scott," I said, "they're letting us go." Scott looked at the supervisor; the supervisor looked at the floor.
"Is that what you mean?" Scott persisted. The supervisor nodded. Several of the guys were devastated. They had bought color TVs, made down payments on trucks or sports cars they could no longer afford. I went home and made a snow angel. I was free!
My friend Rod saw me when I came home. "What are you going to do?"
I hadn't thought about it until that moment, and an idea popped in my head that was more certain than anything I'd ever felt. "I'm going to Boise."
I had just been in Boise that August, and it was now December, for my cousin's wedding. My aunt said, "If you ever need someplace to come to, you're always welcome here." The thought had stayed in the back of my mind and rose again to the surface when I needed it. I made a phone call the night I was let go, and in 24 hours had made plans to go to Boise. The next six months changed my life and I found a lot of healing out there with extended family, the mountains of the Idaho desert, and getting caught in a snowstorm somewhere in Iowa.
I've felt that certainty with relationships, too. Usually it's been an invisible door closing, or maybe I've been knocking on the door for some time, not wanting to believe it was actually closed or locked, hoping against hope that maybe I could find a crack in the door, or if I knocked long enough, they'd let me in. During the knocking, the hoping and the wishing my knuckles become pretty bloody, there's a lot of frustration, and then finally, either worn out or realizing that the door really is locked, I step back and start to accept that this is a door I can't open. Sometimes it's a mixture of hopelessness, despair, and acceptance, but there's peace in it too. I've stopped knocking, I know there's a change coming.
It happened like that at the end of college with a girl I had been pretty into for about three years. Unfortunately it has taken me a lot longer to realize something that other learn pretty quickly, but there I was, knowing without having to talk about it that things were over. We went ahead and had that final conversation anyway, and the next week she was dating the guy she would later marry. In the meantime I began jogging 6-10 miles several times a week and working 70 hours.
Recently I've seen a friend knocking on doors of her own, with work, with school, with relationships. She's smart, talented, educated, and yet every door she knocked on was locked. She couldn't figure it out, and watching it from the outside felt like watching someone being corralled into a very small space where there is only one place left to go, the bottleneck, before opening up into wide open spaces. I saw her go through the bottleneck, which meant she moved several hours away, and now things she'd been wishing for, hoping for, and dreaming about our finally happening. I'm happy for her, and at the same time am left wondering if there are wide open spaces for me as well. There's a dream I keep carefully hidden, and most don't know how much I struggle with it because I've learned to hide it well, but the longing is still there, and for now so is the bottleneck. The last couple months I've lost some things that meant a lot to me, and am seeing doors close left and right. Something's about to change. That's the only certainty I have right now.
