A 777-day love story
My plane touched down in the U.K. at Manchester airport 777 days ago yesterday. Back on terra firma, only part of me felt really grounded. I had some ideas of how good this might be, for many seemingly solid reasons, yet many things I’d planned in the past didn’t quite turn out the way I’d expected — let alone hoped for. This could be different…or not. I had no idea.
That’s why I bought a one-way ticket for my trip.
I wanted the flexibility to stay longer if it went well…or to leave asap if it didn’t.
What I discovered along the way included that some rather weighty parts of the preceding 2–3 or more years, and the decades before them, were packed deeply in my mental baggage that I’d not checked at the airport in Denver the day before. Inadvertently I was bringing them with me, wanting them or not. I didn’t know what was lurking in the recesses of my mind’s storage compartments…there seemed to be endless hidden drawers within hidden drawers that could only be accessed if the universal energies were aligned just right (or wrongly?)…
Interestingly, the baggage felt a lot lighter than it ever had. I’d done a lot of searching in the dark to find and unpack what I could since having my previous life abruptly altered by forces I first blamed on my others. During the unpacking period I began to see that I, not anyone else, had placed each ‘item’ in the recesses — and that I was the only one who could rediscover them and handle them accordingly.
I’ll write more on the unpacking process later but it is critically important to understand how the past 777 days have meant the world to me. Indeedio, I feel like I am the luckiest man in the world.
My life is like I’ve played a cosmic slot machine and hit 7–7–7, winning all the riches I could ever want.
Our start, “ironically” enough, began on July 7th, 2016. 7/7/16 = 7/7/(1+6) = 7/7/7…
I’ve learned the adage “You can’t win if you don’t play” is 100% true.
Our 777-day love affair was only brought into life because both of us were willing to risk hurt yet again. I’ll not go into the details of either of our past lives but our stories were similar to many others: hope quashed by tragedy, love gained then lost, little traumas and big traumas followed by quiet regrouping times, and endless choices that helped us and hurt us.
Not sadly, mind you, because every experience, every moment of greatness and pain, worked in concert to bring us together. In exactly the ways we were meant to arrive, scarred and scared, resilient and reticent, full of bullet holes and unceasing internal light…
We, so to speak, ponyed up to slot machine and willingly fed it our hard-earned money. Knowing that the pull of the one-armed-bandit’s cold metal rod could end up in a bust or a burst of grandeur.
We didn’t enter into the Casino of the Heart unprepared, though. For sure, we’d spent the 141 days (another meaningful number to us) between 7/7/16 and the day I flew out, exploring how we could best increase our changes of LUCK. Not ‘rigging’ the system, mind you… capitalizing on our the broad learnings we’d had independently of each other, those shared along our preparatory way, and frank discussions of where we truly wanted to go in life.
We tried to use the learnings of others, too. Studying the love stories of the ancients (like Rumi and Shams of Tabriz in Elif Shafik’s “The Forty Rules of Love”), modern poets and sages (like David Whyte and his “Consolations” and, in turn, Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s “The Invitation”), and our own network of dreamers and sirens. Oh, and we dove into what some would consider the less-than-traditional research and thoughts of the ‘science of luck’ by Richard Wiseman.
These preparations helped us in innumerable ways to navigate the unclear, oftentimes murky and dangerous, waters of global relationships. One American and one Brit, united and divided by a common language, interpretations of life driven by traditions, cultural biases and time.
They did not prepare us for everything that was to happen.
Thankfully.
As Michael Singer speaks so elegantly about in his “Untethered Soul” and “The Surrender Experiment,” if we spend all our days in a cause-and-effect pursuit of success, we will rob ourselves of the spontaneous joys of life that can ONLY occur when we open ourselves up to the greatness the universe is waiting to give us. Spontaneity and surrender are inseparable: we only have our breaths taken away if something beyond our wildest expectation occurs (or when we’ve toiled for too long that we can’t continue…and we die).
We also realized that what was to happen had to happen on its own time, not ours. Again, dictating the whens and wheres of life kill the inherent creative spark that precedes our own by timeless ages. It took me 18,486 days of being on this earth before I had the chance to hug her. A long time in the coming, in some ways, but a blink of an eye on the grand scale.
Every moment that took me in the direction it did. I avowed to not miss a single one like some people do…
Every advancement and every setback.
Every supposed joy and every supposed sorrow.
Each of these are a part of our daily life, too, as they are what will carry us forward the next 777 days.
Happy Lucky Day, my love. Here’s to the next jackpot that is guaranteed to come.
