Foward

There’s something in the air that makes me overly aware of age and life’s preciousness.

Maybe it’s the documentaries I’ve been watching lately on women in film/media that are in their 80s and 90s, creeping up on the end of an era. Or simply the realization that I’m entering a new age bracket with my parents aging and starting conversations with a possible count down of “what’s left”, and my dog developing old age symptoms. Change is always coming.

I always feel shocked by how I got here, to this age, to these thoughts, to this stage of processing so much on living my life. Wasn’t time just on my side? High school was just yesterday… not 20 years ago! Lately I’ve been forward focused in my thinking, really futuristic in my plotting, thinking way outside a realistic timeline. I see scary things there, expected loss that I’m not ready for, will never be ready for. But there’s new space that’s not built on fear. Now I see questions waiting in line, questions of wonder tap me on the shoulder, pondering what it is that I see, what do I want and what things will I set there?

Being in midlife, divorced with no kids I feel set apart a bit from my peers who are still in it with little kids running around. Our current life focus quite drastic in difference. Matched up better with my friends creeping through their 50’s, their kids have moved out becoming independent, my friends find time they’d forgotten to rediscover themselves. Yet our timelines are a near 20 years a part… I’m not there yet either I’m just here…feeling slightly lost in the dark.

Questions of navigating my life as it is, maybe some of the questions are a light in the dark. Maybe this place found me amidst all the down time during covid, each day so much the same. Or maybe it’s new freedom that comes at the end of grieving. Having found peace with what isn’t I’m able to see with a new perspective what I might now envision. I’ve wandered past my boundaries to find this wide open field…what shall I do with the next part of my life?

Still unsure of what part I am in, I think for the first time I’m honestly spent. No answers come forth and yet it’s okay with me to just exist here. No pressure to respond, no rules to follow, no voices of expectation get in the way. Simply entertaining these questions I feel a slight tip in life’s balance…perhaps it’s a season when new dreams are on the way.

The past sends reminders every November, that I used to write daily from a frame of gratefulness. Spending the whole month digging deep, for 30 days chasing reasons and places that I was truly thankful for. It set a bar rather high for myself, to be so entrenched in searching for joy in the season of darkness. This year I feel like I should find it again for a focus, to keep myself positive when the world appears to have shut its eyes, but rather than writing from the past of where I’ve been and what I’ve learned as a way to be grateful, I think for this round I will posit my questions with no expected answers. Wandering around lost in possibility of what I might see when I look for free, with no pressure, should or others expectations. Facing forward to the future, both near and far, with hope and curiosity, instead of expected loss and its fear. I’m going to explore new dreams of what it is I might want in the future waiting for me.