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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Finding Your Page 43. Welcome to Begin Again. If you're new here, this is the recognized movement of my reunion tour, a faith based journey for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Last episode, I left you with a question. What has the loyal soldier been standing in front of, and what might be on the other side of the door?
Winston Faircloth:I hope you've been carrying that with you since the last episode. Today, I wanna tell you about the day I actually found an answer to that question for myself. Not a theory, not a framework, a specific afternoon, a specific page, and a story that changed how I saw my whole life. I want to begin with a poem. The poem's called The Wall.
Winston Faircloth:It was from day 993. A present restlessness unfolds, felt deeply yet unnamed, whether crisis or midlife, growing stronger ever untamed. We may seek to avoid clocks we try to turn back. Unphased, it awaits until we acknowledge our lack. Round and round we go, staying busy, distracted.
Winston Faircloth:His invitation to go deeper, to grow must be enacted. When identities no longer fit, when fate feels desert dry, this hurdle, this door, we must finally face and try. Going through, not around, we can no longer forestall. A new life faith awaits. Our inner journey begins at the wall.
Winston Faircloth:Going through, not around. That's the line I want to sit with for a moment because it's what exactly happened to me on a page I didn't expect to change anything. I wanna tell you about a page in a book, page 43. A few years ago, before I had any language for what I've been telling you about all season, I was invited to a coaching retreat. Ahead of time, I'd been given a reading assignment, Richard Roer's Falling Upward, a spirituality for the for the two halves of life.
Winston Faircloth:I hadn't finished it by the time I arrived, and I told my coaches much. And she said, if you can't get through the whole book, there's one section I wanna make sure you read before we start. It's called discharging the loyal soldier. It begins on page 43. So on the flight over, I've read it.
Winston Faircloth:And in this section, discharging the loyal soldier, Rohr credits another writer, Bill Plotkin, with a story from just after World War two. Japanese soldiers were returning home, not as celebrated heroes, but defeated, carrying everything that comes with that. And when they got back to their villages, something was clearly broken. Alcoholism, violence, marriages falling apart, all the things you'd expect from men who had been trained at an enormous cost to survive a war and who now had nowhere to put any of it. So in some of those communities, the village did something deliberate.
Winston Faircloth:They held a ritual. The returning soldier was thanked, linked sincerely, publicly for everything his service had cost him and had given the village. And after that honoring was complete, an elder would stand and speak. The gist of it, and I'm paraphrasing because I want you to hear my own words landing on it rather than someone else's exact phrasing with something like this. The war is over.
Winston Faircloth:Let go of what served you and served us up to this point. Come back to us as more than a soldier. Come back as a man, a citizen, someone the village still needs, but now in a different way. I wanna tell you honestly what that did to me sitting there on the story beginning on page 43. I wasn't expecting it.
Winston Faircloth:I'd read plenty of books that told me things about myself, but this one didn't tell me something. It gave me permission for some. Permission to actually look at what had been standing guard over my life for decades, not to shame it, not to attack it, but to finally, formally thank it and then release it. We spent a long time in that coaching session just sitting with this story. And what I came to understand slowly is that recognition isn't really a single insight that you have once and you're done.
Winston Faircloth:It's closer to a journey, a ritual, something you don't see the pattern and move on because you have to actually honor what it does for you out loud, specifically, without rushing, and then just as decisively and deliberately, you have to let it go. There's a phrase a friend of mine, Teresa McCloy, uses that I think names exactly what happened to me in that room. She often talks about getting up on the balcony of your life. You can't see the whole shape of a dance from the dance floor. You have to get up above it onto a balcony to see the pattern of the whole thing, where the room is moving, where it's stuck, and what it's actually been doing all this time.
Winston Faircloth:Page 43 was the first time in my life I remember standing on the balcony instead of the floor. Not because I earned it through more effort, that never worked, but because someone put the right words in front of me at exactly the moment I was finally ready to receive them. I'm looking forward to having Teresa on the podcast. That conversation is still ahead of us, but I wanted you to have her name and image now. And for the moment, I want you to hold on to the image of the balcony itself because it applies to more than my story or hers.
Winston Faircloth:Whatever helps you see your own life from above it, a book, a retreat, a conversation, a season of forced silence, a life map, a coaching session, that's a balcony. And once you're up there, the view just doesn't show you a pattern. It shows you both things that the Japanese village understood, what deserves your gratitude and what's ready to be released. A few episodes ago, I read you a poem called Center. There's still a line in it that I didn't dwell on at the time, but I wanna bring it back now.
Winston Faircloth:The line was, only through our slowing will a still small voice be heard. I want you to notice something from the retreat story. It didn't happen in the middle of an ordinary week. I was away, hundreds of miles from my home and away from my normal pace, away from my phone, away from the version of me that was always solving the next problem. A retreat had built some slowing into the schedule before I would have ever chosen it for myself.
Winston Faircloth:Janet Hayberg and Robert Gelick, who gave us the language for The Wall earlier this season, described something similar about what it actually takes to get through The Wall, not more effort. They named three things, rest, seeking empathy, and waiting on God. For most of my life, I didn't have a working framework for any of these three. So here's another place slowing found me. And because I didn't choose either version of it, in 2019, my consulting practice hit a wall of its own.
Winston Faircloth:Not a metaphorical one, but an actual practical one. The clients stopped coming. Not dramatically, just quietly. One by one, the pipeline of potential clients went dry. And I did what the soldier always did, work harder, network harder, tried every strategy I knew, and none of these opened up the doors to a successful consulting career.
Winston Faircloth:At the time, I would have told you that this was the worst season of my professional life. Looking back today, I think it might have been one of the most important, because for the first time in decades, I couldn't out hustle my way through something. The doors just stayed closed. And with nothing to accomplish or perform my way out of, I was slowly and against my will slowed down. Months later, a retreat someone else planned, a door that wouldn't reopen no matter how hard I pushed, two very different circumstances doing the exact same thing, taking a decision about slowing out of my hands because I was never gonna make it on my own.
Winston Faircloth:I wanna ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it instead of answering too quickly. Is there a page 43 somewhere in your own life? A book you were handed and didn't finish. A conversation you almost skipped. A life map.
Winston Faircloth:A retreat. A sermon. A long drive. A diagnosis. A closed door.
Winston Faircloth:Something that, if you're honest, has been quietly trying to get you up on the balcony of your life for a while now. You don't have to already know what it will show you from up there. You just have to be willing to admit that there's a page 43 in your own life, and it's there. So today, I wanna close with a poem. This one is called Higher, and I wrote it on day nine ninety four.
Winston Faircloth:Both of these poems I wrote specifically for this podcast episode. In the middle of the storm on life's noisy dance floor, it's impossible to see clearly decisions we can no longer ignore. Do we stay? Do we go? Paths to the left and right.
Winston Faircloth:Keep working or retire, abandon or give up the fight. Looking back over life story, no matter the decision, when I trusted and surrendered, always loved in your provision. Knowing how beloved, how cherished, seeking to align with your desire, decisions made from life's balcony helps me see your perspective wholly and higher. Decisions made from life's balcony. As I shared, both of the poems in today's episode were written specifically for this topic, and it says everything that I've been trying to communicate today.
Winston Faircloth:The view from the balcony was never really about seeing more clearly just for its own sake. It's about being able to finally make decisions to stay or go, to hold or let go from somewhere higher than the noise of the dance floor of everyday life. There's a verse in Romans that I think names exactly what happened to me that day at the retreat hundreds of miles from home when I read Page 43 and a few pages beyond, even though I didn't have language for it at the time. Paul writes, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That's what a ritual like the one in the village does.
Winston Faircloth:It isn't just information handed to a soldier. It's the beginning of transformation, a mind being renewed, not because you're trying harder, but because you finally, formally allowed it to release and discover and recognize what it had been carrying for years. So here's a question I want you to carry into the next week. What would it look like to formally thank what has carried you this far and then begin to let it go? What would it look like to formally thank what has carried you this far and then begin to let it go?
Winston Faircloth:Don't rush past the thinking to get to letting go. You can jump ahead of the process here very easily because now you may have a glimpse as to what you've been carrying all this time, and you may wanna get into doing right away. But be here. Be present in this space of a gradual growing recognition before you decide to take action. The village did not and neither should you.
Winston Faircloth:Well, this closes out the recognized movement. We've named the wall. We've told the story behind the bow. We've honored the loyal soldier. And today, we found the page that finally let me see the whole shape of it.
Winston Faircloth:Next episode, we move into release, the third movement of the My Reunion Tour, the actual work of letting go of what you've been carrying. And coming up soon, some point down the road, we're going to have Teresa on the podcast because she spent years helping people find their own way onto the same balcony with tools and precision that I didn't have on my own. That conversation's coming up soon. But for today, though, let's sit with what we found here first. If today's conversation has stirred a desire for you to do this work, I'd love to walk that path with you.
Winston Faircloth:If you're ready to begin, visit myreuniontour.com or check out the show notes for resources, including a link to schedule a conversation with me. It's just a short, honest conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season for you to begin. Thanks for listening to the begin again podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcast. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, anywhere you listen.
Winston Faircloth:Just search for begin again with Winston Faircloth on your favorite podcast streaming app. And finally, if today's conversation reminded you of someone who's been carrying something for a long time and haven't found their page 43 yet, make sure to share this episode with them. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.