When I chose the word ease to embody 2011, what I was secretly hoping for was easy. I wanted to close the door on 2010 and prance into a field of flowers, with showtunes playing and everyone smiling all the time. I wanted to know the money would come, the pain would go, and that I could just float for a while, recovering.

Yup. Easy.

No such luck.

I have opened the Pandora’s box of healing. One thing has led to another and another and another – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – all begging to be taken out into the light, looked at and let go. 5 years from now when I look back at 2010 I will see it as the year my world shifted on its axis. I have a feeling that 2011 will be the year of adjustment, the year that the shift became reality, became me. Which is anything but easy.

And oh wow, am I learning about ease.

Easy wouldn’t have kept me growing, wouldn’t have forced the healing, wouldn’t have pushed me harder and farther than I thought I wanted to go. Easy could have been handed to me on a silver platter and I would have enjoyed it immensely, but ease is up to me. Ease will take me from seed to flower, because it’s about my level of trust, my faith in myself and the world around me. Ease is about sleeping peacefully with earthquake and tsunami predictions and an ocean 100 yards from my bed. Ease is trusting that I will wake up in the morning when the anxiety I don’t even know that I’m feeling is pounding in my chest. Ease is knowing that if I don’t wake up, those who love me will be okay. Ease is focusing on the weight lost and the health gained, not the ache in my neck and the numbers still to go. Ease is living with gratitude for all that I have been given, when I’m being pounded by grief and swallowed whole by anger. Ease is letting go of the story that has held me together and held me back, without having a new one to tell.

Ease does not come easily for me.

It’s what I asked for and here I am, in the thick of learning it, trusting I will come out the other side. Eventually.