I celebrate being wishless.Which, as Grace points out, really just means feeling content.
But, then, in the blink of a "send" button, I am not so fine with it.
My brain starts doubling back over itself. What if it is not "content?" What if it means I am in a rut? Or, worse yet, in a place where "rut" would look good? Because what if it means that...
...I have just given up?
Even as I type this, I know it is ridiculous.So the big question is what triggers the doubt?
The answer is so simple and, boy, does it make me feel small. It happens when I lose track of me and start watching what happens around me. Specifically, when the creative people who are in my life or its periphery get big contracts, great reviews, public recognition. Things I once thought I could reach for but,in the end,required a path that simply was not right for me.
That happened twice last week.
Why does it still affect me? I think its because I am new and a bit unsteady in the face of the age-appropriate but polar shifts in the ground beneath me. I have entered the year of turning 60 and it feels like Nature is doing something to me besides putting hair on my chin. On one side, it is pulling from me things that Used to Be. Fierce ambition, independent and immortal parents, 20-20 eyesight, little girls with problems no bigger than their pink barrettes, the adamant refusal to settle for anything less than exactly the way I wanted it.
On the other side, it is making me tighten my grip on what I cherish: solitude, pine forests, lettuce in my garden in the spring and the fall, muddy dog paws leaping on my clean pants, snores from the pillow next to my own. Good talks with good friends, learning a new word in Hebrew and actually remembering it when I get to Israel. Finding that my words here made a difference to someone in another hemisphere.
Both are really powerful forces right now. No wonder I got caught in the middle.Just writing this makes me feel a whole lot better.
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| On my way to work |
