Foggy Living

Everything about this coming metamorphosis is challenging my previous assumptions.

At age 54, I thought I had a pretty good handle on how things were, on how I moved through the world, on what I believed as truth and what I dismissed as total bunk. I looked back on my behaviors and beliefs of my adolescence and my early twenties, my return to sanity around 30, my hard-learned lessons of parenting, love, loss, community activism & personal growth, and pretty much thought I had it mostly figured out.

HA!

I am laughing now at my presumption. Chagrin reigns. I snicker at my past confidence. I am just as much a deluded teenager now as I was when I was a deluded teenager. What hubris! What a snot! It's so easy to be a know-it-all, when you only know about the big things like mortality in the abstract.

The only thing that keeps me sane right now is the faith that by golly, I'm going to get something positive out of all of this. If I have to stare down this awfulness and live it and move beyond it, I'm determined that I will become a better person for it.

These are the "bigs," where I get to find out what stuff is really in there and what I'm made of. Like the soldier who wonders if he has the courage to fight in the upcoming battle. Like giving birth, where the only way to get the baby is to go through the labor. There is a nagging doubt that maybe I don't have the courage to see it through--I think we all have the fear that we aren't up to the challenges and tests of life. This is where I get to see for sure and draw strength from both the battle itself and the eventual successful outcome.

So, I spend much of the day pushing away the niggles and bucking myself up. "Bring it on," I yell at the fear monster in my head. "I'll show you." ("Put your money where your mouth is," it yells back). All righty then. Game on.