Chapter 28 - Recharging Batteries

Coincidence Speaks

Sep 07, 2024

Happy ~~Friday~~ Saturday friends! Welcome to Chapter 28 of Coincidence Speaks. Just two more chapters to go! Hope everyone has a great weekend.

As always, chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning.↩️

It was time to follow that inner compass and take a step back from the ever-burgeoning obligations of a twenty-year career.
Time to take a chance; to throw all of the pieces of his life up in the air, allowing them to fall wherever they may in full trust.
To create a space for whatever change wanted to emerge, a full transformation of the old into something brand new.

Onward to Chapter 28…

Chapter 28

Recharging Batteries

One year later to the day, Paul Endrum looked out into the audience. Lightning coursed through his body, animating its every movement, fueled by something deep within, a rhythmic essence. Every pulse sparked movement that flowed like living electricity all the way out his fingertips and beyond.

He looked over to the left for a moment, almost surprised to see those fingertips channeling that electricity into the strings of an instrument. The strings took his intuitive guidance, absorbing all of the vibrant, earth tones of the natural wood embracing them. The harmonic signal beamed out of the guitar, into an amplifier, into a soundboard, and finally out to booming speakers that bathed the entire building and everyone in it in an ocean of sound.

The audience was lit up by the same essence. He felt it all, his own electric essence pulsing through his nervous system, amplified out through the speakers, and right back to him. A living feedback loop, a toroidal vortex of sound. Of movement.

Was it his vitality lighting them up? Or was it theirs within him? He couldn’t tell anymore. Everything spiraled together, and all he knew was that the world was alive.

Kaleidoscopic images of light flashed across his field of vision—twenty, thirty, forty blurred and smiling faces. A pair of glowing green eyes drew him in and everything crystallized into one. Clara. Their eyes locked, and in that moment, they saw one another for the first time.

A voice sang out through the airwaves, startling him. It was his own.

The sun was always brighter the morning after a live show. Paul savored the first sip of fresh ground coffee, black warmth soothing a throat crackling and dry like snapping embers of a midnight fire. Piercing rays warmed the crinkled creases of his eyes, and as the dark liquid trickled into his stomach, Paul noticed an old restless feeling there, a flickering in the solar plexus flashing up, asking to be seen.

But he knew now that the real function of fear wasn’t to frighten him—unless a mortal situation called for full fight or flight alertness, fear was only the natural uncertainty of life announcing itself as ready for exploration. The gateway to novelty, the gatekeeper of adventure.

It was fear, after all, which had urged him to accept the invitation to sing in church some nine months before. To pick up his guitar for the first time in years. And embracing that fear had unlocked the series of moments that brought him to this one. And now here he was, earning money doing something he genuinely loved for the first time in his life.

Like sunlight prisming betwixt clouds at the end of a summer storm, new purpose was emerging in Paul. Music was just the tip of the iceberg. He’d learned so much through his unorthodox sabbatical. Enough to fill an entire book.

And after four seasons away, he was fascinated and a little surprised to feel a strong pull to re-enter the ‘normal’ world again. But society sure didn’t feel normal anymore. He didn’t exactly feel normal anymore either. He was an outsider now, bearing witness to a world that had been turned upside down.

He wondered if it had ever been right side up in the first place.

Live music was a welcome creative expression that lit him up, a vital feeling of contribution that he’d never known before. But despite that, despite everything he’d learned, with every passing day, Paul felt more of his energy being pulled into a rising sense of restless anxiety. He was tired. In fact he was exhausted.

Paul and Clara’s family finances had been severely depleted, far beyond his expectation. If formal “retirement” had ever been in the cards to begin with, it was a pipe dream now.

Clara had gone to work full time hours at a private hospital to help shore up the income gap, while Paul stayed home to take care of their children and keep up with their twenty acre hobby farm. And to Paul’s downright shock, he’d soon found that he had even less independence on sabbatical than when he’d been responsible for multiple client portfolios and a team of commercial bankers.

Shuttling the kids to and fro between multiple schools and extracurricular activities, doctors’ appointments, play dates, clothing and feeding and cleaning in unending cycles… always somewhere to be… always somewhere to go… always something to do... By the time he had prepared lunch, made a dent in the overflowing laundry, done the dishes, and cleaned it all up afterward—it was already time to do it all over again. Whether it was dogs, cats, goats, chickens, ducks, or humans—something always needed to be cleaned. Someone always needed to be fed.

He held a much deepened respect and admiration for Clara now—early in their marriage, she had done it all with style and grace while juggling a toddler and a demanding healthcare career, even while he was out of commission with his own health issues.

Paul, on the other hand, felt more and more adrift within his extended home role. Marooned in an endless ocean of domestic responsibilities. Without an office as a home base or a reliable internet connection, he was totally unmoored from the world he’d known. And even though he’d tapped into new creative passions, unlocking talents he never knew he had, they weren’t exactly practical relative to the need to provide for a growing family. Let alone the various plant and animal kingdoms he had become responsible for.

In the rare open time slots of the several hours necessary to venture out and explore new income opportunities, he’d met with with multiple business contacts about various new ventures, looked into brokeraging opportunities, and even doing financial consulting. Nothing stuck. Paul got nowhere.

“Who in the hell wants financial advice from someone who can’t even pay their own bills, anyway?” he thought, a little ruefully.

Paul knew one thing for certain: stay at home dad/starving artist wasn’t going to cut it for much longer. Not for him, and not for Clara.

With every passing day, Clara resented Paul’s presence a little more. Each one was a fresh reminder that her husband had done and would always do what he wanted, even against her wishes. Even at her expense.

She hadn’t gone back to work because she wanted to, but because she felt like she had to. Understandably, Clara did not share Paul’s hard-won sense of trust when it came to financial matters, and at this point, she could see no end in sight to his ongoing lack of traditional employment. In her eyes, her own soulful exploration had been ruthlessly set aside, buried under the landslide of her husband’s unending selfish recklessness.

Her growing doubt and frustration mirrored Paul’s creeping inner restlessness. The aborted attempt to make a career transition three years before bubbled up in his awareness, and he began to wonder whether his current efforts, too, would die on the vine, like everything else he’d ever tried outside of a traditional career. Life came to a grinding halt, and a looming sense of impending failure began creeping into the crevasses of his psyche.

So he did what he always did now when he’d exhausted all personal effort over the given way forward—asked with full heartfelt sincerity to be shown.

It was time to bring the current patterns of resistance up to the surface. Into conscious awareness.

He paused, taking a slow steadying breath, then watched as a spontaneous invocation of breath and warmth and sound and movement emerged into the outer world:

“How can I create the resources to provide for myself and my family in full alignment with who I am now? What is the next step? Show me.”

At that moment his phone crashed.

A pair of tired eyes stared out at him through an obsidian mirror. In quite the reflection of his state of energetic depletion, Paul’s ever-present cell phone now had a battery so depleted it would hardly hold a charge anymore.

He’d been putting off replacing it for months now, because it would be a full day’s time commitment just to make the trip into town to get it fixed.

“I guess that’s the next step then, hey? Time to recharge the batteries.”

So Paul and his preschool aged son got up the next morning, made themselves reasonably presentable, gathered the requisite provisions for a trek into civilization, and piled into the car to get the phone fixed.

Paul looked over his shoulder at Luke, his favorite copilot. “Ready?” His son nodded in wordless enthusiasm, always up for an adventure with his dad.

He pulled the key clockwise, ready to start their latest one. The ignition clicked a few times, sputtering weakly…

Then died.

“Can’t get much more obvious than this,” Paul muttered to himself as he rummaged through the trunk for a pair of jumper cables.

Both his cell phone connection to the outside world, and the vehicle that took him to it wouldn’t start. Both because of dead batteries. Even in his mounting exasperation he couldn’t help but recognize the crystal clear feedback loops his life had provided.

With the cables firmly affixed and in the proper placement, the car roared to life, and a father and a son began their quest together.

End Chapter 28

Coincidence Speaks

Chapter 28 - Recharging Batteries

Coincidence Speaks

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