No Right Answers

The sky was dark and gray. It wasn’t nighttime, but it felt like the evening.

There was a building, a church maybe. I know very little about architecture but it felt gothic— old and large and looming in a way that matched the grayness of the sky.

There were people everywhere forming exclusive groups that they wouldn’t call “teams,” but I knew that’s what they were, and I felt alone.

There was a hunt, perhaps a scavenger hunt, but one with an air of urgent competition, tense and thick. It was suffocating.

And then, it started.

There was no bell, no gunshot, nothing to signal the beginning, but I knew it had begun from the tension in the air and the frantic movement of the “teams” that weren’t.

I had a bag, a backpack, my safety blanket, carrying it with me like I usually do. It wasn’t a first aid kit or a survival kit, yet it had everything I felt I might need. An extra set of clothes. A laptop. A charger. Pen and paper, just in case. I rarely use them, but you never know when you’ll need to write down your ideas, and I bring them with me everywhere.

I approached the building looking for clues. Riddles. Pieces of whatever puzzle I would need to put together to solve the mystery of the hunt. The building was even darker on the inside than the gray of the sky. I was in no apparent immediate danger, but the mood was frantic. It felt unsafe, but it was part of the game and so I went on searching.

Teams of people (that weren’t teams) went by every which way, all seeming to have a purpose, a sense of direction, making progress. I roamed the halls alone, finding nothing of any obvious meaning, though I couldn’t be certain there was no meaning to be had.

I realized I had lost my bag. Or had I? It was stolen. Or was it? Perhaps I’d put it away in some locker for safe keeping. It didn’t feel safe. I’d lost it for sure, and without it, I too was lost.

My search shifted from the game to my bag. The clues wouldn’t matter if I had nowhere to record them, store them. I had to find it.

Down a dark hallway, I came upon a maze, a labyrinth of sorts. There were three intricate paths, each one with a large metal marble at its beginning. I pressed a button, and they all started rolling at once. Around curve after curve the marbles made their way, taking an eternity to get where they were meant to go. I watched, waiting to see which one would reach its destination first. None of them did. Instead, they all disappeared on their respective paths at the exact same time.

I turned around and exited the building to an old car parked on the street. On the sidewalk in front of the car was my bag, undisturbed as though it had been there the entire time. It was lighter out, though not bright. It was the type of grayish gold you’d see through a sky full of clouds just after the rain and just before sunset.

People moved about around me, still bustling, but not frantic as they had been before. They weren’t in teams— they never had been to begin with. They were just there, walking by.

I sensed that the hunt was over, but still felt unfulfilled. I’d found no clues, puzzle pieces. Nobody had. There were no winners. No definitive announcements that that game was over, but somehow, I knew it was. There was just me, holding my bag, strapped over my shoulder standing in front of a gothic church.

I turned around as the light moved across the front of the building, still feeling like I was searching for something, and I was the only one. And then, there was a voice that wasn’t a voice. It was deep and ancient, a bit muffled but crystal clear.

“There are… NO… right answers.”

The air lifted. My shoulders dropped. I felt like I could breathe again. It hadn’t used my name, but the message was for me, and it was the first thing I felt I’d known from the beginning of it all. This was for me.

No Right Answers

Anticipating a major life change can be stressful. Tests like the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory test measure stress based on life events, assigning point values to events that have occurred within the past year and estimating the likelihood of a health breakdown based on your score. According to my score of 390, I’m at an 80% risk of a major health breakdown over the next 2 years… so there’s that.

https://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory

I try to take this with a grain of salt, so as not to worry myself too much. Regardless of how much stock I put into my results, I can’t deny that at the very least, I’ve experienced a greater-than-ideal amount of stress lately. In the past year, I’ve started a family, changed careers, moved twice, continued to pursue the next level of my education, began house hunting, and taken on more financial responsibility than I’ve ever been used to before.

There aren’t very many things that help to ease my anxiety, and when it comes to major life changes, I double down on that statement. “Letting things be” doesn’t come easily to me. I have to do something about something, or I go stir crazy.

Lately, timing has become a significant factor looming over several major life decisions for my family and me. Wanting to move forward, but not being sure which direction to move has had me feeling stuck in a web of questions.

When will we find work/get into school?
When will we finally stop renting and buy our first home?
When will we start trying to add a second child to our family?

Any of these things by themselves can be stressful enough. To juggle all of them at once has my anxiety-brain salivating, ready to pounce on any shred of doubt and insecurity (and oh, there are many shreds). The obsessive thoughts. The compulsive checking for emails from school programs, guides to living in new places, researching real estate listings in different places. The “what if we get a house in one place and then get accepted to school elsewhere?” The “how can we afford to live if one of us is in school and the other is on maternity leave?” The “how much longer can we justify paying what we pay in rent and not owning something that we can truly make our own?”

It’s friggin exhausting.

For months, I tried to find answers to everything all at once. Then I had the dream I described above.

A dream can be a lot of things— scary, confusing, exciting, sad. A dream can be absolutely fascinating, making you wonder why you had it, and what they might mean. Sometimes you’re not too sure that you really want to know, but you can’t help but wonder.

As much as dreams fascinate me, I’ve never been one to write them down and investigate them in any great depth. More often than not, I’ll describe them to someone before the details get fuzzy, and by the end of the day it’s a distant and vague memory.

I don’t think I’ve ever woken up from a dream before and said, “that was meant for me.” This one was different.

I’m sure there’s a ton of symbolism to be found in the dream I had, from the gray and dark sky to the possibly-but-not-definitely religious building to the unsettled feelings of unease and discomfort. As meaningful as those things may be, I’ll save them for another time. There were two things about this dream in particular that really struck me— the labyrinth and the voice.

The labyrinth had three marbles on three distinct and complicated tracks. Each marble was moving at the same time taking many different turns, some that could be seen and some that were hidden. I could see the end of each track, but none of them giving any indication as to when their marbles would reach their respective endpoints.

Work. Home. Family. Three marbles. Three tracks. Three things moving at the same time. And in the end, the voice. “There are no right answers.”

I woke up with those five words repeating in my head, over and over. There are no right answers. There are no right answers. THERE. ARE. NO. RIGHT. ANSWERS.

If that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

I’ve never been so moved by a dream. Never before has a dream both acknowledged and eased my anxiety, while also adding to it (not having answers to things is quite unsettling to me). That’s not to say that my anxiety and OCD are gone, because they certainly aren’t. What that dream did for me, however, was to ease my mind about trying to figure out the exact “right way” to go about approaching each life change.

Before the dream, my anxiety-brain devised thirty-seven thousand different ways things might go and prescribed a plan of action for each and every hypothetical “if,” “and,” or “but,” only to then paralyze me from moving forward with any of them because of those same “ifs,” “and's,” or “buts.” I still want answers that I have yet to find, but I try to hold onto the message.

There are no right answers.

Instead, what I take away from this dream— and the message I hope to share with you— is a sense of freedom to accompany the fear and uncertainty. Freedom to realize that there isn’t one right way to go about things. That sometimes you just need to start with one thing and take the rest as it comes.

One of my favorite lines from the movie Wedding Crashers is not a funny one, but a heartfelt and truthful one that really hits home: “We have no way of knowing what lays ahead for us in the future. All we can do is use the information at hand to make the best decision possible.” I try to hold onto that sentiment, and my dream reminded me of that, too.

In looking back on how I’ve come to have what I have— a family, a career, and many other blessings that I don’t consciously acknowledge as much as I maybe should— there’s no way I could have ever imagined most of them happening the way they did. Yet, they did, and while I may still be stressed, anxious, and trying to figure some things out, I’m ok.

So I say, go with what you know at the present moment. We can’t act on something that hasn’t happened yet, nor can we necessarily act on what we want to happen in the future. Some things just don’t materialize the way we hope they will. But we can do our best to navigate towards the changes we want to see for our lives and start by doing one realistic thing while waiting for another. The paths to where we want to go may change, but a step is a step. And many times, whether we like it or not, there are no right answers.

What mantra helps to calm you down?
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