DEALING WITH LIFE'S PASSAGES

 I’m feeling uneasy these days.  Restless.  Antsy.  Still young enough to live and do and enjoy and yet, as those around me begin to die, and I enter their names in the family tree of life that I have kept for the family for over 40 years, I find myself looking back, trying to understand it all.  Searching for the meaning of life, for understanding of purpose and especially wondering how I will handle what days and time is left to me.

My body tells me I am one age, my mind is still that young girl ready to explore and enjoy the sense of freedom I first felt as a young adult, no longer bound to the adults around me, but on my own—me, doing what my own heart and mind tell me, and accepting the consequences of my own decisions and choices I make along the way.

In all the self-help world of books, my most favorite has been Gaily Sheehy’s, “Passages”.  Our children have been studied and their passages through their different age cycles are understood and accepted as being normal.  Until her book came along there was an impression that once we became adults it was one big plateau of life and we all just skidded along until we hit the middle age crises of life…or menopause.  But through her studies we all learned that passages of life continue right up until the day we die.

So living, as I have discovered, is a series of stretching yourself, challenging yourself, kicking back and enjoy the place you found in the journey and then starting all over again. 

My goals for today are to meet new people, see new places, do different things, take on a challenge that has me out of my comfort zone.  Some of these things I am doing and enjoying.  As I prepare for my trip to Alaska and remembering the three day trip I recently took with my daughter to the Grand Canyon, I think how small is my little corner of the world and how we all take for granted that which surrounds us.  

I’m not sure what it is I am searching for. I just want to be open to new ideas, new people, or new situations and carry that curiosity in the normal everyday adventures of living and with some luck I’ll find that new comfortable place discovered in my own journey of life.