Transition to India

Going to India was a desire of my youth, not just as a travel destination, but as a vocation for my life’s work. I had this idea of wanting to go and work with Mother Teresa and the poor people of India. I didn’t ever get there, or even visit India during Mother Teresa’s lifetime, nor did I ever meet Mother Teresa.

But now in the year of her 100th birthday, I find myself travelling with my husband to Calcutta to visit her Sisters there and meet with people and the work that inspired her life and the lives of so many others.

It was probably for the right reasons that this particular desire of my youth, to work with the poor in India, did not eventuate. To begin with, I did not even know how to make a start in bringing about this reality, and embedded in this, is the fact that I was young and inexperienced. I gave the idea away, and I changed my goal and channeled my efforts into working with people in my home country.

My life then took on a totally different reality, with its blessings and challenges, to what it would have been if I had found my way to India in my younger years.

So as I begin this pilgrimage to India for the first time, accompanied by my husband, I note that life is full of Beginnings and Endings, but that, in itself, is not the end of the story. There is more to it than this. Every beginning and every ending has a transition, and it is the transition that has brought us from the moment or experience of before, and carries us along to the very next moment and the very next experience in our journey.

My journey to India at this stage in my life, had its origins some 40 years ago, and even before that, with the realisation that there is no absolute beginning of this desire or journey and likewise, there is no absolute end. It is all a continuum that occurs through transition.

If we think of new life: The beginning of a newborn has already commenced with pregnancy; the beginning of pregnancy has commenced with conception; the beginning of conception commenced with sexual intercourse, and so on. We could go on to note the moment or event that has led to a transitioning to the next stage or the next experience in our lives. So too, the various endings in our lives have a transition, whether it is the ending of life with the last breath, or the ending of free life with somebody committed to a jail sentence, or the ending of a job or a relationship. With each ending
there have been moments, experiences and processes that have gone beforehand. Beginnings and Endings don’t happen in isolation, and they are not the end of the story.

Transition is the greater part of Beginnings and Endings, and is more authentic in viewing our life story. Transition embraces the flow of life and death, of all of our desires and experiences, and connects us with all other things, animate and inanimate.

And so now I transition from Darwin to Calcutta!