“Aren’t you just talking to yourself down there?” Maybe. If what I’ve found in the deep is just my self—if what I’ve learned is not how to commune with God but how to commune with myself—if who I have learned to trust is not God but myself—and if, for the rest of my life, no matter how lost I get, I know exactly where and how to find myself again—well, then. That is certainly enough of a miracle for me.
Why do we worry about what to call the Knowing, instead of sharing with each other how to call the Knowing? I know many people who have found this level inside them and live solely by it. Some call the Knowing God or wisdom or intuition or source or deepest self. I have a friend with some serious God issues, and she calls it Sebastian. A God by any other name is an equal miracle and relief. It doesn’t matter what we call our Knowing. What matters—if we want to live our singular shooting star of a life—is that we call it.
I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first. I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval. This saves me from living someone else’s life. It also saves me a hell of a lot of time and energy. I just do the next thing the Knowing guides me toward, one thing at a time. I don’t ask permission first, which is just such a grown-up way to live. The best part is this: The Knowing is beyond and beneath language, so I have no language to use to translate it to anyone. Since it doesn’t use words to explain itself to me, I quit using words to explain myself to the world. This is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation. This way of life is thrilling.
I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends, they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges and past and people. Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers.
I’ve got this second key tattooed on my wrist:
Be Still
It’s my daily reminder that, if I am willing to sit in the stillness with myself, I always know what to do. That the answers are never out there. They are as close as my breath and as steady as my heartbeat. All I have to do is stop flailing, sink below the surface, and feel for the nudge and the gold. Then I have to trust it, no matter how illogical or scary the next right thing seems. Because the more consistently, bravely, and precisely I follow the inner Knowing, the more precise and beautiful my outer life becomes. The more I live by my own Knowing, the more my life becomes my own and the less afraid I become. I trust that the Knowing will go with me wherever I go, nudging me toward the next thing, one thing at a time, guiding me all the way home.
HOW TO KNOW:
Moment of uncertainty arises.
Breathe, turn inward, sink.
Feel around for the Knowing.
Do the next thing it nudges you toward.
Let it stand. (Don’t explain.)
Repeat forever.
(For the rest of your life: Continue to shorten the gap between the Knowing and the doing.)
Key Three: Dare to Imagine
When I was twenty-six years old, I found myself sitting on a dirty bathroom floor holding a positive pregnancy test. I stared at the little blue cross and thought: Well, this is impossible. There could not be a worse candidate for motherhood on Earth. I’d binged and purged several times a day for sixteen years. I’d been drinking myself to blackout every night for the previous seven. I’d destroyed my liver, my credit, my record, my tooth enamel, and all of my relationships. My aching head, the empty beer bottles on the floor, my bank account, my ringless, trembling fingers, they all screamed: No. Not you.
Yet something