I once knew a man who survived a plane crash.
My first instinct was to ask him about it — a question that, in hindsight, feels as cringe-worthy as asking Monica Lewinsky about the Oval Office or Neil Armstrong about the moon or Bob Dylan about going electric. As if his entire existence and everything interesting about him was reduced to that one defining event.
But as someone who’s never had a near-death experience, I selfishly wanted to know, through him, what it was like. And he kindly obliged, probably reciting the soundbite answer he’d perfected over the years, like an actor on a press junket.
My predictable follow-up question was the overly presumptuous, “How did it change your life?” His answer, to my mild disappointment, wasn’t a dramatic tale of blowing up his life, quitting his job, and moving to an island to pursue a simpler life. Instead, he doubled down on life as it was, focusing on improving relationships and being a good dad.
I told myself he must have missed the lesson in what was surely meant to be a massive wake-up call. He stared death in the face and “noped” his way out of it.
He wasted his second chance.
When I faced my own version of a near-death experience, it shook the purse of my life upside down, spilling its contents all over the sidewalk and leaving me to pick up each item and carefully examine it before putting it back.
But change doesn’t always have to be so drastic. And if we’re on the right path, doubling down isn’t necessarily the fist-clenched tug-of-war denial I had convicted the plane crash survivor of, even in response to a once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster event like that.
Seemingly minor moments, like a stranger making a passing remark, for example, can shake loose the domino that sets an alternative course into motion.
Last January, I hosted a gathering with about a dozen women. A friend taught yoga and I provided the materials for people to create a bottle of natural perfume. Someone asked if I ever did this at the farmer’s market, and that off-handed question ignited something inside me that felt like an engine explosion.
Cut to two months later. I was launching a natural perfume brand with a create-your-own experience at the farmer’s market. I went all in and I kept going: investing in branding and equipment and furthering my knowledge.
This was not my New Year’s intention. It was a small moment that had an outsized effect and changed the focus and course of my year.
Sometimes, the big events in our lives affirm our lives as they are. And sometimes, the little ones sneakily work their magic like elves tinkering under the cover of night to transform a living room into the indelible imprint of a core childhood memory.
One of my earliest memories is clinging to the mailbox between the double house I grew up in as we moved from one side of the house to its mirror image on the other side. I was hysterical, beside myself with grief about having to say goodbye to the only walls I’d ever known — despite those walls being shared with and identical to the new ones on the other side.
In college, I borrowed my brother’s car while mine was in the shop and used the trip home as an excuse to haul my entire wardrobe back for some free laundry. That night, he took the car out for a drive with a friend, unaware that I’d set the E-brake out of habit. Hours later, the car was engulfed in flames outside the friend’s house, its windows shattered, my clothes destroyed by smoke and water, and covered in a billon pebbles of tempered glass.
In my teens and early twenties, music defined me. The back of my car was covered in band stickers I diligently collected and proudly displayed so that anyone idling behind me at a red light would know I had “good” taste in music.
After college, I donated my desktop computer to the family room. Finally free of writing papers, I reasoned that I no longer needed it. But I hadn’t anticipated my dad deleting my entire music collection — thousands of songs, painstakingly downloaded à la carte on Napster — to free up space.
I bought a little red sports car on loan in high school. I couldn’t count the number of weekends and summers and second jobs I worked to pay it off by the end of college. Right after installing a new sound system and a trailer hitch for my move across the country, it died in the unforgiving wilds of the Arizona desert, en route to San Francisco. Its successor, a “safe” 1990s Volvo that I bought with my last savings, died six months later on the side of the highway in the pouring rain, this time in Terra Linda, California, on my way back from a job interview.
This series of relatively minor losses are things that seemed like A Big Deal at the time and are, in retrospect, almost embarrassing to recount as Anything More Than a Nuisance.
But most things are not life and death, and rather a series of thousands of small deaths.
Each one is an invitation to die to our old selves and step through the threshold into an alternative version of our lives. Each one has the potential to change us if we let it.
Of course, we can also choose to push away the invitation. We may want to return it to sender — especially if it comes in an envelope stamped with loss.
This is self-preservation, the instinct to cling to and protect what we have at all costs. To keep it because we know it, or we don’t know who we’d be without it. To clutch it to our chests, even as our fingers are being broken to release our grip. To bury it with the fervor of a king whose city is being ransacked. To bury it so deep, it would take hundreds of years of steady erosion to unearth.
I’ve been guilty of choosing this option too. I’ll save you the suspense: ultimately, it doesn’t work. What has been buried will eventually rise to the surface.
When my quarter-life crisis hit, I lost myself.
I got engaged because it felt like the next step after three years of dating and being past the age I thought I “should” have been married by. Because it was a public proposal on Christmas Eve. Because he dropped to one knee, and though I instinctively said, “No, no, no! Please, get up!” I relented and said yes to save us both from the embarrassment (though I didn’t consciously realize any of this at the time).
Years later, in the blue light of pre-dawn, I rose from bed like a marionette ghost and calmly said, “I’m going to take a shower, pack my bag, and leave.” Because with every passing day that I buried the truth, I was burying myself alive, one handful of dirt at a time. Because I couldn’t bear to discover what a lifetime of that would have cost me.
At the time, it felt like the closest I’d come to a near-death experience. But then I lost my daughter.
We will experience thousands of small deaths in our lifetime, each one layering like compost encouraging a slow bloom. And then there are the ineffable losses, the ones that break us wide open. These are less like a gentle unfolding and more like stepping through a doorway or being shoved out of a plane, a direct portal to a new stage of life. But all of them require metamorphosis, the uncomfortable and inevitable prelude to growth.
The literal translation of the word metamorphosis from its original ancient Greek is “after form.” What comes after form?
If butterflies are any indication, it’s caterpillar goo, the stuff they liquify into before taking the shape we know and love.
Perhaps, like the butterfly, our future forms lie hidden in the imaginal cells of big and small moments that change us. The ones that melt us down and dissolve all the unnecessary parts. The same ones that will set us adrift on the wind, unencumbering us of our heaviness so that we may, someday, take flight.
Write back. I want to know — what small moment(s) changed you?
P.S.
I’m starting a digital book club. It’ll be a casual, come-and-go space and you can read at your own pace. We’re kicking things off on January 19th with The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
If this sounds like your speed, you can sign up here!
P.S.S.
Special thanks to my newest patrons, Tom M., Cathy L., and Jon M. Your support is like the silk that weaves my cocoon of creation. Thank you for believing in this process and for helping me spread my wings.
I put my copy of The Artist's Way on my coffee table on January 1 to try to inspire myself to work through it solo but would much rather do it in community with you!
Beautiful ❤️