As this week comes to a close, I’m struck by the idea that living in the middle and honoring the process comes down to living life. Really living it.

My friend Kristine captured this sentiment in a quote she shared: “you will be lost and unlost. over and over again. relax love. you were meant to be this glorious. epic. story.”

Our lives are indeed epic stories. Every single one of them. No one on this earth is without an epic story. Yet we fail to acknowledge as such. We fail to our honor our processes and those of others.

As we live life, we move in and out, up and down, around and around. All of nature is designed this way. Everything is constantly moving. Everything is transitioning through a process. Think of the tides. Think of the solar system. Think of the seasons. Think of the life cycle.

We have no reason to resist our nature other than our social conditioning that tells us we must.

We can change our social conditioning. We can become aware of it, acknowledge it, and let it go. We can soften. We can be lost and unlost. We can be our epic stories by embracing our humanity as it is.

We can do any number of things to be in the middle and honor the process. We all have a responsibility to do so. We can no longer base our lives on that which extends no farther than the corners of our own rooms. We must contribute what we can to our collective story.

We must give ourselves space to experiment, explore, and fail. I think our society pushes us to do things perfectly. Mistakes are punished, and people judge us based on our competencies. To mess things up and not know what we’re doing are criminal offenses. We often lose jobs, relationships, opportunities, admiration, and credibility for not having it all together. Is this not ridiculous? Is this not completely contradictory to the human spirit? In a quote that I shared on Facebook this week, Buckminster Fuller said, “The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

What in the world would we do if earning a living were a concept that did not exist?

What would we think about?

What actions would we take?

How would we treat each other?

We’ve come to believe that we have to earn our right to be human.

This must end, my beloveds. We must do right by each other.

We must be willing to face what’s in front of us with courage and power. We must learn how to embody our human right to brilliance, happiness, and peace. We must embrace ourselves and others and LOVE ourselves and others as we’re whipped through the washing machine of life.

We must give ourselves and others room. We must forgive. We must embrace. We must soften.

We are ok. We are safe. We are, when we let ourselves be, “the middle” embodied. When we honor that, we honor the process.

In love and liminality,

Annie Rose