Elizabeth and Andy are asleep upstairs. I wonder if they are dreaming as I type these words. Joshua is at school slogging through his first three periods - his least favorite. I got up this morning to see him off. Monday's are my only time to do so as I work in the early, early mornings Tuesday through Saturday. Bob and Sarah are in Ohio heading to the Cleveland Clinic today for a check up for Sarah. She will have an MRI and then meet with her neurologist to discuss the results and the progression that her disease has made. Sarah thinks new lesions will be found on her brain. I pray to God that this is not so. I hope He hears me.
I have been thinking a lot about death lately. Specifically how it relates to life, and the life that I choose to lead. What is important to me? I mean, what is really and truly important? Is it prestige? It is riches? Is it family? Is it a career? Is it homemaking? Is it being the best mom and wife I can be? Is it health? Is it faith?
So often I spend my days leaning in so close to the details of my life that everything get blurred and confusing. Trying to chase all of the details of my life and contain them all - control them. It is exhausting. And completely worthless. If I take a longer lens and lean back from life and imagine how I will see it when I am 85 what will matter then? What will be important?
Answers to these questions arrive in glimpses. A moment here and there when I can see with full clarity. This has been happening for a couple of years. It started once people I knew began dying. People who shouldn't have - young mothers and fathers and babies - people who could just have easily been me. Then the moment passes, and I am back to my fully neurotic ways of leaning in way too close to my life. Focusing on the wrong things. Missing the ones that truly matter.
I know that many people dread getting older. They hide their age and pretend they are younger. Not me. I have always embraced getting older because it means I am still alive. It means that I have gained wisdom that I didn't even understand or know existed in my younger years. I have earned my years. Some years have been beautiful. Others brutal. But I have earned every single one. I turn 40 next May and I am really excited about that.
But I also don't want to rush time either. God willing, getting older will be a smooth transition and I will be able to fully enjoy life, but I know that this is not guaranteed either. I have seen too many people who have not aged well as life takes a cruel twist and robs them of a life they have earned to live.
My goal in life is to get to a place where my glimpses of the clarity I seek in this life will become something more than just a moment in time. I want to learn to live my life where the majority of time spent here on earth is lived with harmony within. The war and chaos within has to stop or it will destroy me. Maybe that is what all of my unhappiness has been about? Maybe I am just living out of tune with myself, and my aging mind and body just doesn't have the patience for that blatant abuse of my limited breaths here on earth. Maybe my unhappiness stems from the inner voice within screaming: abort!, abort!, abort! when I am living a life that is not truly mine.
I seem to come to this place of stripping down emotionally naked every so often. I begin the process of doing so, and then I begin to lean in too closely to life again, and all of the work that I have done gets put on the back burner as I frantically try to gain "control" of my life. A younger version of myself might have been angry with me for not getting the work all done or seen its lack of completion as a failure. This is not how the 39 year old me sees it. I see the previous work I have done as laying brick work for the future foundation I will build all of my moments on. Each time I strip down bare I learn something new. And even when it seems like I will never be able to move forward because I have leaned into my life yet again and got caught up in the nonsensical and non-important details of life - what I have learned is still there buried within. You can never rid yourself of your moments of clarity. Even if it feels like you have lost them or buried them too deep to ever recover them - they are always there waiting to be recalled and found. Authenticity is always waiting for you and I to grab it. It is the unique instruction manual we have each been given when we were born to this earth. It is there to receive when we step out of the madness and distractions of this life.
I find myself doing to hard work of stripping down again. I do not dread this work because as I walk this path time and again I am finding it easier to find my way back. When I take the time to remember what it feels like to live in harmony with myself the answers to what I need to change in my life right now come pouring down like rain. Instead of being afraid of drowning, like I so often experience when I am leaning in to my life too closely and paying attention to the wrong things, I welcome the answers with open arms. I take each one in and make the steps needed to live the only way I can and find peace within myself: authentically.
And so I will make changes in my life, knowing full well that I may have to make these same changes again one day in the future, but also knowing that each time I do so I am making a path back to myself so that when I come to this point again finding my way back is that much easier. This process, which I once saw as a burden, I know now is a gift. I am a Seeker. I am always seeking and will continue to seek all of the days of my life. I also wonder if I will always get lost. Maybe the gift of aging is that you are able to catch yourself wandering off of your own path quicker than in your youth, so you can right yourself faster and live in harmony for longer periods of time?
Yesterday, after Bob and Sarah left for Ohio, the three remaining kids and I hung out most of the afternoon. We watched a movie together, played card games, board games, and a game Andy made up. We made dinner together - all of us in the kitchen doing our part, and then we cleaned up together. The boys asked to play video games for a bit, so Elizabeth and I watched a TV show together. At 8 pm the boys got off of electronics and instead of getting ready for the week they all came down to the school room table wanting to play more games. And so we did. And it was a good afternoon that felt just as it should. It felt right and in tune. I want more days like that. I want to have more days where I am WITH my kids with ALL of me. I can only do that when I am living in harmony with myself which means I need to take the time to recall what that looks like for me in my life. Because as I was reminded yet again last week, this time here on earth is not guaranteed. I need to stop wasting my moments leaning in to the unimportant details of my life.
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