There comes a day, somewhere in the middle of every woman’s life, when Mother Nature herself stands behind us and wraps her arms around our shoulders, whispering
“It’s time.”
“You have taken enough now. It’s time to stop growing up, stop growing older and start growing wiser and wilder.
There are adventures still waiting on you and this time, you will enjoy them with the vision of wisdom and the companionship of hindsight, and you will really let go.
It’s time to stop the madness of comparison and the ridicule of schedule and conformity and start experiencing the joys that a life, free of containment and guilt, can bring.”
She will shake your shoulders gently and remind you that you’ve done your bit. You’ve given too much, cared too much, you’ve suffered too much.
You’ve bought the book, as it were, and worn the t-shirt.
Worse, you’ve worn the chains and carried the weight of a burden far too heavy for your shoulders.
“It’s time” she will say.
“Let it go, really let it go and feel the freedom of the fresh, clean spaces within you. Fill them with discovery, love and laughter. Fill yourself so full you will no longer fear what is ahead and instead you will greet each day with the excitement of a child.”
She will remind you that if you choose to stop caring what other people think of you, instead of caring what you think of you, you will experience a new era of your life you never dreamed possible.
“It’s time” she will say…
“to write the ending, or new beginning, of your own story.”
-Donna Ashworth
Peg sent me that today. I always meditate hard on the things she sends me. It's always a "woman's life" in some circles, but let's face it we guys have always spoken of the lives of men as if that's a universal. Truth is truth. And boy, this feels like truth.
I spent my day in court today listening to spirited arguments about what is enough caulk in a water intrusion case and feeling, at a visceral level, that I wish I'd died doing something heroic in the skies over Iraq rather than enduring this season of life carrying trivial disputes as a burden on my soul. Nothing heroic about any of this.
And yet . . .
Better off dead? Hardly. I can say today and, if I'd known enough back then, that the life we two have now is the one thing of great value, the pearl of great price, much like in some ways the raw joy of parenthood when it's good (and, I reckon, sometimes when it isn't). My whole life has arced toward this time. I'm starting to feel the dread I hear some folks share when they realize the finitude of it all, that once they've found true love it's hard to justify anything that creates a space between the two of you. And yet I'll be here tomorrow enduring a second day of arguing in front of a judge over caulk and wet, rotted floor decking. Had we but world enough and time . . .
An old flying buddy of mine died yesterday, fell off a ladder and hit his head. Peg's fascinated with the mechanism of death. Me, not so much. I'm enveloped in the grief his widow expressed on social media at the loss of the love of her life, barely twenty years into their ride together. Way too close to home.
And tomorrow I'll argue in court over caulk, while P sleeps on a pillow a thousand miles away. A pillow in a place I've already begun to grieve, realizing that the only thing that makes my moments there possible is my day spent tomorrow arguing over caulk. It's the only place that's ever resonated with me, but we've got to let it go because the numbers just don't work.
Beautiful night on the bay.
I get the whole God as a cruel trickster thing. Giveth and taketh away.
Time for a nap before teeing up tomorrow's fun.
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