Coming full circle, ending up somewhere completely different

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliot

I've never been big on exploration. I love routine, I had the same friends since I was in elementary school. I liked doing the same things, with the same people all week and every weekend. I had never even quit a job until I was 27. (There were a great many things I had never tried at 27.) I would just stay until the company downsized, or my position was no longer necessary, and I'd move on then. Not before. I liked going to the same restaurant for a weekend date, ordering the same thing I always got there. I stayed with my first real boyfriend almost 10 years. I married him, even though we were never really in love. Change terrified me.

There were a certain set of beliefs thrust upon me at an early age, and I bought into that one hundred percent. I accepted what I was told at face value, and worked as hard as I could to make a success of that lifestyle. I did everything I possibly could to further the cause, to the point of breakdown, exhaustion and disillusionment.

Once I rejected those beliefs, and ended up broke, homeless, jobless, friendless and divorced, it was a shock. I had no idea who I was anymore. What was I without my friends, the group, my special position within it? So reluctantly, I started exploring. I'll be the first to admit a lot of that "exploration" was actually just self-destructive behaviour. Once you leave an established way of life, with a rule for everything, and you realize you don't believe it anymore, all of a sudden there are no rules.

So you try new things. I'm probably lucky I didn't end up dead (or worse). It wasn't for lack of trying.

But for all my pushing myself outside my comfort zone, within the past year, I've come almost full circle. No, I'm not back at exactly the same place I started. I make the rules now for what is "good" and "acceptable" for my life. But it does feel familiar, a lot more like the old me than the "interim" me I'd been exploring. My moral compass is not pointing in exactly the same direction it used to, but it's pretty close.

I watched a movie yesterday about a girl that went through the same experience I did, being shunned by her family and friends for deciding she loved someone who had a different faith and belief system. It was so familiar, yet the whole story seemed so crazy, so controlling, so completely against every fiber of my morality today that I almost couldn't believe I used to be one of those people. Not bad people, just so completely misled.

I understand those who have a deep devotion to God. But it's sad that so many people who say they love Him, live a life so completely opposite to all the values history tells us Jesus taught and lived by. He never shunned anyone, but spent his time with the sinners and downtrodden.

I don't know how this post became about Jesus. It wasn't my intention. :) I'm not even sure I believe in him anymore. I just know that despite how drastically life has changed, I'm happy I made it through the fire and managed to land on my feet. It helped having a few people who believed I would. And Eliot is right, once we come full circle, we are back at the same place we started, but it looks entirely different. And different is good. :)