We want to feel.  We are made to feel. We note the wind when it blows hard and when rain hits our skin like needles.  We cover our ears when the noise is too loud.  But the thing I remember most is the way the air felt on my skin when I walked away from years of feeling unseen and beaten down.   

I remember the way the air touched my skin.  I hadn’t felt that in years.  Nothing painful or angry, nothing big, nothing whipping, nothing to protect, just quiet air, all around.  It was warm.  And kind.  And it enveloped all the senses of my body.   

I wasn’t clenched.  I wasn’t being strong.  I wasn’t trying to stay calm or thinking of the next moment and how I should react.  I was walking through air, that had always been there.  But now I could feel it. 

I wondered how many other things I hadn’t felt or heard or seen.  I wondered how many days I had missed birds chirping, laughter in the distance, water tapping on the sidewalk during a rainstorm. 

I stopped and breathed, into the space around me, into the void of fear and anger and regrets.  I didn’t care where the next step was or what happened next.  That moment I knew I had left something that wasn’t for me.  And I walked towards a cliff.  And looked over the edge, and the abyss before me was friendlier than the strain in my muscles, the emptiness in my future, the chaos I was living in, every second of every day.   

I jumped.  Not without thought, but with the idea that this jump into the unknown would be less terrifying than laying down and dying slowly, one breath at a time, while running about crazily.  There was nowhere left to go in my current life, no rock I could hide behind, no prayer I wished I had prayed, no noose I hadn’t considered, no song or word or olive branch to be offered and not accepted or welcomed.   

It was this or the death of my soul.   

We want to feel.  As humans we want to feel. 

And the pain was felt for years to come because we can’t unlearn the pain of our soul being crushed in a moment, a day, a year.  We want to unlearn, but our minds have already given us so much practice to stay in pain, to stay in fear, to stay in protection.   

When I walked off the cliff, friendship caught me, the unknown was friendly and unfriendly.  There were different types of challenges and mistakes and chaos.  But it wasn’t the chaos I had called home.  It wasn’t from people who loved me.  It wasn’t headed toward darkness and more pain.   

So I felt it and learned to stop feeling it.  Years later, I hear the pain in a friend’s voice, in a client’s story.  I know that pain.  I feel it.  Like there’s no way out.   

And the precipice is too high.  And the choice between the pain we know or the pain we will endure extricating is the only crossroads we see.   

And I send them love.  And I send them hope.  And I tell them I hope they find what they need.   

And for a moment, sitting at my desk this morning, after a call with a client who is in pain, loneliness, loss, forbidden dreams, I felt the air on my body the day I chose to take that small step, off a cliff, into the abyss that wasn’t complete joy.  But it was a path I hadn’t seen from the top.  And it was there.  They say the road will rise to meet you.  And it does.  It’s not the road you know.  You can’t choose it before you jump.  But when it rises to meet you, it brings hope.  It brings a quiet and the feel of your own skin.  It brings another step, another moment of faith.   

It brings a future you can choose.  And that you will choose again.  And again.  Until the road meets your soul that has healed and life is what you knew was yours.   

Jump.  Feel.  Choose something past the pain.  Even when it is just more pain.  The road to less pain is never the road without pain.  One must go through.  Over the edge. Through the remnants of habits of sadness and pain, harboring anger.  One must walk towards the joy, without knowing if they will ever reach it, in order to have any chance of finding it.   

And you, you will find the joy too.  And it won’t feel like you knew. 

But don’t stand on the cliff and decide forever.  You will never feel something different there.  So if you are human.  If you must feel, feel something different.  Feel something as scary as where you are, that might lead somewhere more you.