In Flourish this week, we’ve been talking about dreams, but to get to dreams, first we had to talk about our sense of belonging in the world; we had to talk about our internal compass.

Some of us feel we don’t have one. This leads to a sense of spin, a sense of no real purpose. I know this feeling because sometimes I have an internal compass and sometimes, more often, I don’t. I don’t know where it goes, but man oh man, it just disappears. 

It’s like the screw that holds the compass’s needle falls off and the needle and any sense of direction falls away, also. This is one reason alcohol has never been that attractive to me—it’s a thing that disorients me, and I’m already sufficiently disoriented. Giving someone like me a beer is like giving a hammer to a broken egg. 

I have found the intensity of my sense of curiousity depends on how oriented I feel inside myself. If I am in full drift mode, it’s harder to draw a line of interest between A (me) and B (something else). I guess if you asked a drowning person what three people they would most like to have dinner with, the drowning person might struggle to care enough to search for an answer. 

Just throw me a damn life preserver!

Did I mention that not having an internal compass also tends to make me irritable or depressed? It’s like I’m a blender without an on button. I mean, what’s my point of existing if I can’t do anything? 

Curiousity is like smoking a cigarette (unless of course you think smoking is disgusting). I mean it’s like smoking a cigarette when you are twenty-one years old and at Al’s Bar with your college roommate and it has newly occurred to you that you may only wear black for the rest of your life and get a tattoo as soon as you are sober enough to drive. Curiousity is the burn you pull into your body, the risk you inhale, the dangerous questions you walk. Curiousity, for me, is like a rocket when plugged into source, into…a sense of being…a sense of belonging…a sense of importance…a sense of I am this, and I am thinking about that. 

Curiosity springs from the diving board that sends you flying into the sky and then plunging deep into the watery unknown. In order to fly, you need to take off, and to take off, you need a starting point. 

You need ground. A sense of place.

When people are adopted, maybe there could be a surgery that would install a compass into the brain, the heart, and the guts. This is where you are. This is home. Bon voyage, little one. 

It’s not nothing to feel that you are floating through life. It’s not nothing to fear having dreams because the sense of inevitable disappointment is powerfully strong. It’s not nothing to feel unmoored, unknown, unsafe. 

What if adopted people were enrolled in life-long orienteering classes? What if we were taught what true north felt like? What if somehow society knew how to get those who were unmoored from the mother too early to feel plugged into the world, plugged into the cosmos, into north, south, east, west, into heart, soul, skin, hope and love and belonging?

My head feels like the universe, unskulled, undefined. This means I am so open, so wild. But when I am not plugged in to something that grounds me, I can’t create in a way that feels exciting and true. I drift, spread out like spilled water, disappear.

What if it is my job to establish my own compass? What if it is my job to claim a parking spot for Anne, my job to park myself, press the eject button, fly?

What am I waiting for?

I know who I am waiting for, and it’s a foolish waiting. 

I could die of this waiting.