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It’s taken me at least sixty days of travel just to find SLOW. For weeks, all I felt was, react, react, react. The heat wave arrived like an uninvited squatter, settling into my first week, claiming space in my new home in motion. You can’t drive when it’s 105 degrees. You can’t sit still. And you definitely can’t afford to drain resources on cool air you don’t even have.
But today, I feel the slow. I feel the smoothness in my joints, the way my skin moves in sync with the fascia beneath, like my dog curling into her blanket—each fold finding its place. When you slow everything down, you feel everything—until what you feel is nothing, a quiet nothing that holds everything. It’s here that I start to reflect, and when a memory pulls me in, I slow it down even more, turning it over, exploring every hidden corner.
Today, I thought about marriage. Then about being married. Then, about being married twice. And what came up was regret. So I slowed it down—still, regret. Slowed it down more—regret. Even slower—regret. I made my breath almost silent, and there it was, buried beneath: fear.
My marriages were born of fear. I ask myself: Can love ever be born of fear? Can fear father a child of love?
In my marriages, I never felt truly loved. I felt admired, envied, desired, controlled, resented, sometimes broken down. And now, I wonder if love is something you have to come from. Not a well you search for, but one you build yourself, brick by brick, until the water rises to meet you. Love has to be everywhere—but I never allowed it to fill my well. I didn’t even know how to dig one. If I had, I wouldn’t have married—twice.
I regret taking so long to love myself enough to have said no—twice.
Earlier this year, my son asked me, “Do you think you stay single because you’re afraid? Afraid that another relationship might fail? That being single is your way of avoiding hurt?”
I paused. And now, even as I slow down that moment in memory, I think again about my answer.
I replied, “No, I’m not afraid of being hurt. Nor am I afraid of losing myself. But I need to be fully engaged in life before I can share myself with someone. And I don’t yet feel like I’ve let all of myself in.”
Now, as I sit with those words, I feel something both the same and wholly new. I feel myself rushing back into my body like water cascading over rocks, smoothing their edges. I feel myself in rhythm with the sky, the earth, in the rise and fall of my breath. But I am still waiting for those lost parts of me to return—those fragments I left behind along the way. I am waiting for a reunion that will fill me with wholeness. Because I am so much more than I ever imagined.
I release regret. I release the fear that regret has held. I release the loss of the many soul-pieces of me. I release the hurt I caused to others when I moved from fear.
When I breathe in slowly, and breathe out slowly, it is as though that time in my life never happened.
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