My wife got home from her closing shift from this beautiful restaurant that she works at. It was late, the kids were in bed, and I had only woken up when I heard the garage door shut.
I was excited to see her. In our 7 years together, I always was. I loved to see her walk through the door, look up, see me, and have a soft smile gently grow on her face. Tonight, that smile was a little strained. She walked over and gave me a warm hug and as I wrapped my arms around her, I asked her, “how was your night?” “Okay.” she replied and then, with her eyes pointing down, followed up with, “I think I want an open relationship and some space to figure it all out.”
I stood there for what felt like minutes but was only a fraction of a second. Taken aback, I responded with, “Okay, what do you mean?” My heart was pounding. I felt myself rapidly zoning in and out of our conversation. What was I just told? What was going on? What was she telling me in this very moment where I had drifted into my head? I forced myself to focus and actively listen to what she had to say.
She had a realization that night at work. She had realized that she had not been feeling fulfilled and wasn’t sure about how she felt about “us” anymore. In fact, part of the realization was that she had been trying to figure out what was wrong with her over the past weeks, months, even years, everytime she would have this feeling of something missing and try to convince herself she was being silly and that she had a great life with me and the kids. She still felt that it was “great” just not fully her Truth. She had a catalyst that had opened the door to this epiphany, one that she had not fully embraced as something that she was truly missing and craving. He was her fellow Bartender and an energetic, charming, handsome man that she told me a moment later she had shared an unexpected, yet very welcomed, passionate kiss.
It is moments like this where you find yourself often one of two things:
1. Vindicated by the way that you react because it is the way you always thought you might act if you were ever faced with a scenario like this.
Or
2. Oddly surprised by the way you handle receiving such information. This time, I was in the latter category.
My mind and heart were at war. My heart was telling me, “What the fuck did she just say? Is she serious? How could this happen?” Yet my mind was saying, “What had I been missing and for how long? Could I have done anything to prevent this? How DID this happen?” Suffice to say, when hearing this and the information that would follow, something inside me cracked.
Now when I say “Cracked” I don’t mean: snapped, broke, or defeated. Sure, a part of me was feeling a lot of emotions, but there was also this part of me, this dormant, hidden, powerful part of me that clicked into my body at the pivotal moment of me hearing what my wife had just told me and her reasons why. A thick, hard shell that had been encapsulating this part of me cracked in that moment and started to flow back into my awareness. A part of me I had never fully realized until this very moment. A moment where you are faced with the very real truth that you are not only losing something that is one of the most important things in your life but also, that you had actually started to lose it years ago and you had just been ignoring it up to this point.
I was hearing every word she told me. She had asked me to grow with her. She asked me to explore with her. Take risks with her. Experience the world and all it had to offer…with…her. What did I do over most of our 7 years together? I made excuses for why I couldn’t or why we shouldn’t. I would tell her that I was happy where I was and that I had what I needed. I would use things like time, money, or fear to dictate my decisions. I had become the type of person I had told myself that I would never become: Someone who chose a life of complacency.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and yet, I couldn’t believe more the person that I had become. I had always dreamt of adventure. Of exploring the world. Of experiencing as much of this world as I could while I was on this planet. I had let myself believe that the only thing that was in my way from having and experiencing all of this was: money. When I was a kid and young adult, I told myself that all I needed to do was find a way to “get rich” and then I could start living my dream of a life of adventure. As the years had passed and that kid started to grow up, failed endeavors and attempts to land a “job with huge earning potential” took over my outlook on the world and my place in it. I never felt like I “perfectly fit” anything I tried, and yet, considering myself an eternal optimist, I always managed to find the silver linings in anything I did. Now, you let that mindset accumulate over years and different job opportunities, and you slowly but surely morph into someone that the young you would not recognize. This brings me back to “The Crack”.
“The Crack” is the ignitor that started the EXPLOSION of who I am and what I am actively pursuing. It felt like an energy that had been locked away and compressed so tightly was starting to leak back into my being. I realized as this was happening that I wasn’t living my True Life either. It had just taken the threat of losing something (or someone) that matter so much to me for me to embrace it. My True self had been released and instead of being angry at me or making me feel bad about locking it away in the first place, all it had to say the instant it showed up in the calmest of composures was, “Alright. What do you want to do next?” My True Self embraces EVERYTHING. It heard what was being said and it felt everything I was feeling and all that it had on its mind was, “Yep, we fucked up our plans. How you wanna go about fixing your life?” It was in this next moment that the incarnation of the “Mortal Trinity” was born.
The “Mortal Trinity” is a concept that you may hear me mention quite a bit in the following days, weeks, months, or even years. This is because it is currently a huge influence on how I am actively pursuing the life that is in front of me and the life that I want. Let’s break it down, shall we. The phrase, “Mortal Trinity” represents 3 major aspects that I believe every person must interact with, confront, and/or balance at least once, but more likely, constantly throughout this mortal existence. These three parts of the Trinity are:
- You as an individual/person/man (in my case)/”The Self”
- You as a creator/life-giver/parent
- You as a partner/companion/lover
In a flash of awareness, I realized that my life really was able to be summarized into this Mortal Trinity, and by doing so, I also realized the power I now had recaptured to do something about becoming my optimal self.
I needed to grow in all these areas. I had become complacent and lazy in all of them. I hadn’t let any 1 of the 3 take charge, I had let all of them become idle and with that, I had become idle and stopped growing. I had stopped pursuing the dreams that I had always wanted. I had stopped trying to become the best father I could be. I had stopped finding new ways to be a better partner and lover. I was NONE of the things I had thought I was. I was none of the things I wanted to be.
This is the start of my journey, my TRUE journey. A journey to being the man I truly can and want to be. Being the father I truly can and want to be. Being the partner and lover I truly can and want to be. Welcome to the birth of the Mortal Trinity. Are you ready to see where it goes from here?
–Andy