At the Crossroads: Controlling Our Transformation

Crossroads are the most important points in this geocentric space called life. They are vital for one's transformation from the old to the new, from rational to irrational, from the tangible to the intangible, from the imagination to the reality. Crossroads are necessary intersections that negotiate our relationship with that which we cannot see and which we cannot know. For this reason, crossroads are often approached reluctantly.

But crossroads define our life and thus would make life impossible without them. Historically, these points of intersection have given way to an extension of life rather than the shrinking of it that we commonly associate with them. 1992 Nobel Prize writer Derek Walcott, describes the historical crossroads that gave way to Black Atlantic cultures and religion. He states in "The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memories,"

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger
than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole...
This gathering of broken pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain
more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels
taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is the restoration
of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago
becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent...
This is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments,
these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially
remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They
survived the Middle Passage," (Walcott 2).

While Walcott speaks of the transformative process by which the Old World became the New, a process that did not shrink the lives of my ancestors who were brutally kidnapped from the life they knew but extended it, it is important to understand this process as being one in the same as the process we experience as individuals. Just as it is a fallacy to think of Black Atlantic cultures, languages, and religions as a separation from West African cultures, languages, and religions, it is incorrect to consider our present circumstances so separate from our future. Our future is merely an extension of our present state that embodies all of the new creations that developed out of the collision between what was and what is.

What many of us fear in our terrifying twenties, is the collision itself. As many of us have experienced, the point of any collision is, more often than not, rocky and painful. Ironically, in the middle of me writing this blog, I cried for the tension in my current relationship....long distance relationship. I'm at a point in my life at the age of 24 and as a woman slowly coming into her own, where I no longer want to be in a relationship that isn't going anywhere. I can't just date someone for fun anymore...I feel as if my time is getting shorter and the days are moving quicker. Being the youngest of three, I have always grown up more quickly than most other women my age and so I see 30 approaching rapidly (my naivety telling me that 30 is old and that I should be married and headed toward children by then). So little arguments I have with my boyfriend of seven months seem magnified and telling of our future. I sat scared for what the recent tension in our relationship means...a breakup? Maybe infidelity? Maybe abuse? Maybe it means I'm supposed to find something new? Something new of myself or of him? These collisions of the reality of my relationship and the imagination of what will become of it continue and my reluctance to see that a transformation is taking place continues. However, I am nonetheless at a crossroad in this relationship, a crossroad that I'm afraid to confront.

Fear of the unknown and unseen is not unnatural, but comes with the territory of collision and eventual transformation that occur at our crossroads. Fear, like any emotion, is merely a form of energy. Knowing that energy can be neither created or destroyed, we know that we have control over the process of transformation through the way and the place in which we transfer our energy. I guess I would consider myself in love with this man. But more and more each day I begin to feel that being in love is overrated. If the arguments persist, if he continues to show his ass, will I allow my fear to be transferred into a place of emotional suppression in which I simply put up with more at the expense of my own feelings...because I'm in love? Or, will I channel my fear into a place of strength in which I muster up the courage to walk away? Essentially, will I facilitate the transformation into an abusive relationship or the transformation into a stronger and more secure self? What happens before and after the point of our crossroads is thus entirely of our own control.

But even when at one crossroad our transformation doesn't yield the most hopeful outcomes, we have still created an experience, no matter how shattered and fragmented it may be, that is invaluable. Life is about building upon experience, good or bad, to create new ones. It is not about choosing which experiences will have meaning and which will not. Every experience will inevitably have meaning for our new one's and will thus extend our existence, not shrink it. If we begin to think in every moment that it is not our last, but our first, we may begin to approach those crossroads with less apprehension but with more eagerness. That is not to say that the collisions that make life difficult like being broke, or lonely, or in pain, should be easy or feel good. Certainly, the tearing up of families, the forced slavery that my ancestors experienced was not easy. However, it is to say that these "shards", these broken pieces of our life, can be assembled into an expression of life that is greater than what we are or what we were if we have the audacity to consider these collisions foundations for our progression.