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Miscellaneous Monday
Soothing Sunday slipped away silently. Monday started with an explosion. Children who were being much too silly for a Monday morning were soon yelling charges of injustice at their sleepy parents. Apparently, having your children fold laundry is a heinous act of war. It turns them into "slaves." Storming off to their rooms to cool down, the laundry lay in an all too familiar pattern of disarray. Some days they don't really have a clue no matter how certain they are that they have.
I have an idea how they feel. I was young once. I was a girl at war. Today, I also know that in the larger world outside the boundaries of their own heads reality awaits them. It will bite with sharp teeth some day soon. They don't know that most of us are at war with something.
Against this backdrop of battle, angst, chaos, yelling and charges of enslavement, I have to face the emotional fallout that another birthday brings. I am at war with age. I escape the house, the angst, the battle to wage one of my own. Tomorrow I'll be 53. Where did the years go? I wanted to grow old gracefully. I didn't want to mourn the passage of youth. I wanted to celebrate each gray hair and arthritic ache. Instead, the person I see in the mirror is a stranger. This stranger frightens me with her wrinkled brow and dour expression. She isn't much fun at all. She can't appreciate her childrens' early morning silliness. She just wants the noise to stop. She's a woman at war. She is no longer a girl.
Any yet, some where inside the girl still lives. She plays foolish games before heaven. She charges into battle on a steed made of hope and causes. Her eyes crackle with desire. She is on fire. This girl is so far away. Or is she?
I think of my children. In their angry faces, I catch a glimpse of my own. I want to swoop them up in a giant hug and wish their angst away. They are just trying to define themselves. They struggle to figure out who they are. How can they know that this is something that their parents still work at every day?
The girl has disappeared again. The older woman remembers the stranger's face she saw in the mirror just this morning. Everyday is a new opportunity to figure out who we are. I can spend the day getting to know the stranger in the morning mirror or I can spend the day battling change, the inevitable march of time, the thousands of little deaths and rebirths that find us every day. I am weary of the war. I am ready to make peace with that which can not be changed.
The time for my body to be young has come and gone. Age does bring some benefits. I make a list of things that age has taught me.
*Cooperation is sweeter than victory..
*Picking one's battles makes all the difference.
*Admitting that one is wrong is a courageous thing to do.
*Knowing why there are rules and being able to see to the truth beyond them.
*Knowing when to break the rules and when to keep them.
*Understanding that being kind is often more important than being right.
*Making peace with fear makes all the difference.
*Life is fragile and much stronger than one can imagine.
*Paradox moves us forward. I makes the world go 'round and keeps the stars in the heavens. Invite paradox in. Embrace it. Learn from it and then send it on its way.
*Endings and beginnings are not really all that different from each other.
*Each day brings promise.
I am at war no longer. It's time to go home and comfort the troops.
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