A Brighter Light
I should be asleep right now but I am on vacation and there are no shoulds on vacation. I'm too pumped up from an epic grumpy cat battle that involved me and The Zombie extracting an angry kitty with a broom and pillows and then locking ourselves in our bedrooms. We have no idea what set the cat off. We were just chilling on the sofa and out of nowhere the cat freaks. No noises, no activity, nothing out of the ordinary but suddenly we have one of those cats from every scary movie you've ever seen on our hands. We were just hanging out; all quiet and cozy. The Zombie thinks it was the house ghosts. I think a stray female must have sprayed outside the house. But it is raining and it has been raining for hours so if my theory is the correct one this would have be one desperately heated kitty. She must want it badly if she's willing to prowl for it in the cold rain. We really don't know but in any case neither of us wanted to sleep with the crazy devil cat now pacing up and down the hall.
So here I am awake on the night after Christmas listening to the rain. The Triad Christmas never made it to completion; the College Boy didn't come so we only got two out of the three Apples here. The Zombie will be with us through the New Year and the College Girl has already come and gone. The non-traditional holiday turned out to be so peaceful and stressless by comparison to the big production. AppleJack did a simple leg of lamb and roasted root vegetables. I handed out the quilts from Grandma's cedar chest. Then we gave the dog a bone, made a pot of coffee, and declared it all jolly. The entire family was able to relax and just enjoy the day without a crapload of must-dos and have-to-haves. Even the kiddos remarked that it was much more fun keeping things small and simple this year, which made it even better that they "got it". Usually around this time on the 26th I'm saying how glad I am to have it all over for another year but strangely enough I don't feel that way at all. It was nice and easy this Christmas.
I am resisting the urge to sum up 2011 because I just don't feel like picking it all apart to determine whether or not it was an overall good year or a bad year. Of course it was both. Of course there were high highs and low lows. Of course there was both bliss and misery. People died. Cars were crashed. Bills were paid. Bridges were burned and later rebuilt. Miles were run. Love was made. Mistakes were made. It was all just a tumultuous mishmash of things real and raw and resilient. I feel certain that I am closing this year having become a better person than I opened this year so whether it all qualifies as good or bad, the end result is that I feel satisfied that none of it was wasted. At the very least I ran from nothing this year; I faced it all and learned to sit with the realities of life as opposed to the fantasies of life. I had to make my life a little smaller in order to handle that level of learning. I don't regret it; the decisions I made in the interest of plumbing a deeper depth of truth about myself and the life I am responsible for creating were crucial. It doesn't matter how tidily it does or doesn't fit into a seasonal anecdote.
I decided against the timeline project leading up to my birthday because it ended up shining a brighter light into the storage room than what was sufficient just to organize all those memories and changes. I realized that the strength that was forged in the process of perpetually starting over wasn't meant to make me proficient at starting over. It was meant to train me to move past everyone's greatest fear of losing it all and live life from a different centerpoint. Someday I was going to wake up and stop living my life defensively. Someday I was going to have to make decisions from a landmark well past the point of losing everything. I was going to be required to go the distance past the barricades and No Trespassing signs and the only way I would ever have the resources to do it was to keep going and NOT start over again.
Perhaps the point of 2011 was to not do the thing that now came easily to me. Just as in marathon training, you repeatedly train up to the threshold of diminishing returns without crossing it until race day. Most marathoners only train up to 20 miles even though the race is 26.2 miles because training longer than that breaks down the body too much to facilitate adequate recovery before the race. On race day you have to finish well past the point of your longest run so you lose the luxury of telling yourself "It's okay. I've been here before. I know what to do." So it seems to be for me in life. I am past the 20 mile mark now and have lost the luxury of familiarity but it is now a circumstance of my choosing instead of the feared result. However admirably or terribly I handled it over the last year the satisfaction of recognizing the learning is enough of a summation for me. I don't need to rehash what I could have/should have/would have done differently. It worked out the way it needed to work out. My old yoga teacher Cliff used to say "Everything is always already okay." I think that's a lesson you have to live to learn.
(c) 2011, ACG
You give me pause to consider what you've written today. I am adept at starting over. The goal, however, is not to continually start over, but to keep going. Thanks for reminding me.
Reply to this
I must remember your words, "I've been here before. I know what to do." Thanks, Sass. A light bulb moment for me.
Reply to this