Dear Gaia:

Back to the Ivy Analogy: I am reading it in a different way this morning. “a climbing plant.. growing ‘randomly’, without stable supports or surfaces to lean on it naturally needs.. it needs to lean, twist and wind around something else.. to keep growing and live.. I am that climbing ivy who gets bigger and longer but around my ground there’s nothing to lean on, I just keep growing ‘randomly’.. my ivy needs ..something happening. Departures. Responsibilities. What makes you, you… the tangible thing to lean on.. (is) what makes you, you.. you turn into a certain way because life shapes you in a certain direction.. with certain people and events+ inner traits. Sometimes I feel like life has forgotten that I exist and that I need happiness, challenges and newness to keep growing. Instead I feel stuck in a limbo of stagnation and negativity since forever. I feel like I have clothes that don’t fit me in and I need life to give me a valid excuse to throw them away, but it doesn’t.”

Yesterday I saw the “stable supports of surfaces to lean on” as emotional support in childhood that you didn’t get, growing randomly alone with the hysterics of a melodramatic mother. But what you meant (and I missed it because I was too attached to my understanding) is that the stable supports of surfaces to lean on are new events and new people in life so that it will be possible for you to grow with purpose, or with meaning, with passion, perhaps. (I got it now, did I, Gaia?)

Assuming I got it this morning, here is  my understanding at this point based on the quote above: to grow purposefully, with the feeling of being alive, you need challenges outside of you, in your life, new people and new events to react to, new people and events to give you new growths paths, above, under, in between, to the right of, the left of, and as you grow or move in new paths, there is an element of discovery and adventure, a truly living life-experience, as opposed to the “stuck in limbo of stagnation and negativity since forever” life-experience.

“I feel like life has forgotten that I exist”- you feel that life is outside of you, and you are stuck in non-life, is my understanding. “I need life to give me a valid excuse to..”- as if life is outside of you and you are angry at it, at Life, for not showing you the way in, so that you too can live.

I will stop here before I go on, because I don’t want to build on the above and then find out that you don’t agree with the foundation of what I continue to build. So, did I understand correctly by this point, or is there anything at all that I misunderstood?

anita