Wednesday evening and yesterday morning I shoveled piles of snow: five inches of snow had accumulated from the snow storm on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I needed to clear the back driveway to get my car out of the garage and drive to the airport. The back driveway is about 25 square meters (~270 square feet)… Five inches on a surface area of about 25 square meters is A LOT of snow! I had never shoveled so much snow in my life (and hadn’t shoveled any snow at all in a decade)! It took me over an hour, close to an hour and a half, of hard work — a real workout! But I must admit that I enjoyed it — maybe because I don’t have to do it every day!?!
Shoveling snow is tricky (at least for me). You look at it and it doesn’t seem so bad: nice and white, smooth and shiny, it almost looks friendly. Then you start and you realize how HEAVY snow is (“of course”, says the physicist in me, “water has a pretty high density!!!”). And then the piles start getting too high and the snow slides off them, so it becomes something that feels like a civil engineering project as you raise each shovel-ful of deceiving white fluff and ponder very carefully where to place it next. As the driveway starts clearing up, the snow piling up more or less neatly on the edges, pride and/or hope seep into your heart until the shovel hits something hard which isn’t the pavement… Now you’ve struck ice. This might be the trickiest part of it all. The ice is inhomogeneous, sleek and slippery in some spots, thick and rough in others: but everywhere simply too hard to do anything about it except be careful of it.
However, this workout-chore gave me plenty of satisfaction.
Today, I started a different type of “snow shoveling”.
Since starting psychotherapy around a decade ago, I’ve done several rounds of it in various countries (& languages) and with several counselors who used different methods/approaches, and tackling different aspects of my life and emotions. In the past couple years here in the U.S., I’ve done some counseling intermittently, mostly to address contingent issues or difficulties that arose at the moment, focusing more on practical ways to overcome them or deal with them rather than digging into the deep causes.
Moving away from the setting that had grown familiar to me over the past five years cleared space in my mind and heart, and toward the beginning of this week I felt a desire that I recognized, that I had felt very intensely for the first time 8-9 years ago: the readiness and even eagerness to tackle older/deeper “stuff”, to dig into the “real issues”.
So today I started this new process, or new phase: in this morning’s session, I started shoveling the snow that lays over my soul. And it was no lighter job than shoveling the snow off the driveway the other day. The snow covering my soul is just as deceiving, just as heavy — and the layer of ice under it, stubbornly covering my heart, is just as tricky as the ice on the pavement. This is going to be a hefty job. There’s just so much of it: A LOT of snow. So much I’ve never told anyone, not even my closest friends or romantic partners. So much I shut inside me, so much I buried deep down inside, so much I’ve been carrying around. I’ve been able to function efficiently in practical ways: getting through school as far as my PhD; finding good jobs; moving, traveling, learning a bunch of languages, adapting to new places and many countries; enjoying vacations and adventures and fun times; growing professionally; pursuing my hobbies and interests; meeting people and making connections. But in deeper relationships I have always struggled: when it comes to real closeness, that’s where the hard challenges arise for me (and I had to restrain myself from writing, “that’s where I fail”).
It was hard work today. And it’s going to get harder — it’s bound to get worse before it gets better. But just as shoveling the snow in the driveway, I know the effort is well worth it: once the deceitful snow has been removed and the tricky ice has melted, then the road will be clear and safe for my car to drive out, taking my heart for a ride in the world with some passenger(s) sitting next to me, at last!
The Little Prince and the Fox 