PART IV: Chapter 23 - A Whiter Shade of Pale

Coincidence Speaks

Aug 02, 2024

Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Part IV of Coincidence Speaks — the home stretch: Part 4 of 4. 😮 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!↩️

Part III culminates with Paul in a Decision Corridor…

This time Clara wouldn’t be coming with him. This time he would be on his own. The stage had been set.
How much are you willing to risk? his life seemed to ask once more.
Then all the feedback loops stopped, and everything paused, like a held breath.

PART IV

Chapter 23

A Whiter Shade of Pale

Paul felt sick. The cold lump of fear was in them both now.

How could he have not foreseen her reaction? How could he have ambushed her like that? How could he be so thoughtless?

Ascoltare… maybe he was the one who hadn’t been listening all along.

“Happy birthday, moron,” he muttered under his breath later that night, staring up at the living room ceiling from the couch. Sleep was impossible as the ceiling threatened to engulf him. Guilt weighed down his conscience, and he felt his courage buckling under its pressure.

And it finally broke him.

He knew that he wouldn’t go through with it. That he would stay at his current job and work to support Clara and his family even though he knew it wasn’t aligned with his deeper yearning for a greater freedom. Because that’s what men were supposed to do. Produce. Protect. Provide.

And in a part of him quarantined away the very moment it arose, Paul resented her for it.

The next day Paul woke up defiant, filled with a swift competitive vigor. This was his life after all; no one else’s. He didn’t need permission to follow his own inner compass, not from anyone dammit, not even his own wife.

He would make a life transition all on his own, with or without Clara’s support. He would make time to find new aligned ways of earning income through pure motive and focused will, while staying where he was for the time being.

He would set his alarm even earlier. He’d retrain his nervous system to start every morning at 4am. And instead of pursuing awareness expansion practices that didn’t serve much practical financial purpose, he would use the extra time to research and establish an online business, build websites, and connect with likeminded people all over the world.

And he would do it right smack in the midst of raising a family and working a traditional full-time job.

From the outset there was plenty of creative vitality for his high-minded endeavor. A torrent of ideas poured in out of the morning darkness, and he worked feverishly in the grey area before each day to channel them into the world.

But the harder he worked, the more his energy waned. Everything he pushed so hard to create died on the vine, victims of harsh perfectionism. Unfinished projects disappeared into the ether from whence they came, never to be seen in the light of day.

After another month, once the initial excitement had worn off, the last remaining vestiges of all creative passion left altogether. He simply didn’t have the energy anymore. He was totally empty.

And Paul gave up.

The last vestiges of autumn gave way to winter while a deep gnawing emptiness within him grew and grew, until it swallowed him whole, and he fell headlong into a deep depression.

The only feedback loop in life now was a constant saturating dullness, a listless void where the sense of interconnective flow used to be. The dwindling memory of paradise lost was far worse than never having known it at all. Every day at the office and every day at home suffocated Paul with stifling sameness. Every moment turned a whiter shade of pale.

Even his trusty Dad Humor had left him now. There were no more movie quotes running through his head—not even a canned sitcom laughtrack. Just a vapid, dull blankness reaching grey tentacles into every crevice of his being.

He couldn’t seem to feel anything anymore—emotions had turned to ghosts, and only the gnawing memory of their absence remained. A phantom in his own home, he went through the motions of each day mechanically, on autopilot programs — father, husband, provider, consumer. Awareness expansion practices had become pointless. He just couldn’t seem to settle down anymore on the rare occasions he tried. The only thing waiting for him in the stillness was that same haunting numbness.

There was hardly any joy even in watching his own children play.

One bone dry winter’s evening Paul slumped into his car having just slogged through back to back plodding client meetings. He hardly held himself up at the steering wheel, a heavy sense of despair weighing down sagging shoulders like an Atlas stone.

It happened to be the winter solstice, but Paul could no longer hear nature speak.

A lifeless hand reached out to start the ignition. Freckled and veining with age, it hardly looked like his own. He started pushing the feeling of oppressive numbness away again, “Man up and get on with your day, dude…”

…then stopped.

This time, he took a resigned breath and decided once more to at least try to turn inward. As he now thought of it, there was nowhere he really had to be for the next hour or so.

Sitting there in a rapidly emptying parking lot in a nameless office park in the middle of rush hour, Paul just… sat.

And sat.

And the more he sat, the more something churned and roiled beneath the surface. A long neglected, pent-up feeling grew and grew…

…until all at once it burst up through him. The full entirety of the submerged emotion he’d been resisting for so long, hidden just beneath the numbness the entire time:

A devastating, archetypal sense of abandonment.

It wanted to take over his physical body. It wanted to move him. So he let it.

The intensity dissolved limbs and lies into a ragged mess, windows misting with the fog of breath and tears. Doubled over against the steering wheel, Paul put out a silent APB to any benevolence left listening in his life:

“I’m all alone and it’s my fault and I don’t know what to do anymore. Please give me some kind of direction. Please. Show me the way back.”

“I’m lost,” he finally choked out aloud, desperate for some kind of response.

A unmistakable thought impulse pierced through the swirling fog of his emotions like a hot laser.

“You need to move—now”

Without any agenda or any place to be, Paul followed the impulse and went into action without a second thought, firing up the ignition and putting the car into reverse.

The stereo fired up along with the car, and with it, a random song came on autoplay, its startling title now populating the dashboard in front of his face, echoing the exact words he’d spoken aloud just moments before:

“Everything’s Not Lost.”

Paul let out a tepid laugh for the first time in weeks, despite himself, feeling something in his chest area crack and thaw just the slightest bit.

It was too late to go back to the office, and too early to head back home.

So Paul just drove for one mile, then two, then ten, no destination in mind, no GPS, just following the first impulse on which way to go whenever he came to a stoplight or stop sign. Finally he found himself in a part of town he’d never been before—a place called Echo Lake Park.

The urge landed to get out and walk through the bitter December cold, even with just a thin suit jacket for warmth. At least the stabbing cold was something he could feel as it ripped through the threads of his blazer. The winter wind pulsed shockwaves through his body, the electrified pins and needles like blood returning to limbs that had fallen asleep.

Beyond the rhythmic crunch of his dress shoes grinding down dead leaves, the only soundwaves piercing the crisp winter air came from a group of ducks making muted splashes on the otherwise glassy lake. Paul counted seven of them—six brown ducks and one larger white one had apparently claimed the park as their seasonal home.

And as he wandered around the gravel loop encircling Echo Lake, the strangest thing kept happening.

Whenever he stopped walking, no matter where he was on the loop, all of the ducks would stop what they were doing, stop splashing, and come together in a precise straight line away from his vantage point. And somehow, that big white one was always at the far end of the line, like a star or an angel atop a Christmas tree.

It didn’t just happen once or twice. It kept happening immediately, every single time Paul paused, over and over. Like there was an invisible line of magnetism between him and the big white duck on the opposite end that brought the other ducks in line. He kept on testing it at different spots over the course of several minutes, and the phenomenon kept on repeating like clockwork. Incredulous, finally he could no longer deny that some way, somehow, Nature seemed to be speaking once more.

“What the heck is happening! Why are these ducks lining up like this?!”

A powerful thought impulse burst into his awareness in instantaneous response:

“Chill out—It’s OK to get your ducks in a row!”

And finally it hit him.

He didn’t need to pressure himself so hard to change everything with his life and career in one fell swoop. Certainly he’d felt the explicit guidance to step away from his current career path to create space for something new—of that he had no doubt. But there was never any explicit guidance about timing, about him needing to cut ties and leave right away—that part was purely his own interpretation of events steeped in egoic impatience and his own overeagerness.

The exact same overeagerness which had clouded his communication with Clara in the first place.

And ever since that Decision Corridor moment, he’d been judging himself so harshly for his perceived “failure” to follow the call of his soul, for his unworthiness to proceed any further along the pathway given. But now he realized that regardless of any past action, the draining energy of self-condemnation itself had become a reinforcing loop—and it was the very thing barring him from moving onward now.

As the ducks realigned one final time, the full truth dawned:

“No matter what happens, the only real failure is to quit. To stop inquiring within!”

The entire row of ducks burst into a loud symphony of affirmative quacks right after the thought landed, their first and only vocalization of the evening, as if to applaud the breakthrough, “Hey! You finally got it!”

Paul laughed aloud again, for the second time that day—and started anew.

End Chapter 23

Coincidence Speaks

PART IV: Chapter 23 - A Whiter Shade of Pale

Coincidence Speaks

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