Here’s what I know. It’s all a churn, old goes out, new comes in. It happens before we’re ready. Life doesn’t wait, and good thing too because ready is only something we can feel in hindsight.
In the now, right here, this moment, I’m always mid-breath catch. Is this why meditation concentrates on the in and out of breathing, slowing it all down to the basics of living? Breathing. Paying attention. Be here now.
That’s when we can see how it all played out so far. We get through it. We always do. Not without chunks taken from our souls or bones ripped from our flesh, but sometimes when we get busy learning how to walk again, on brand new giraffe legs, all wobbly and disjointed, we notice they all grew back.
Memories of past lives lived within this one are the freckles on our skin. I’ve always thought there was something off about how we look at growth and transformation. I haven’t become this new self. I am the Russian nesting doll of all my past selves, who still live in me wholly formed and real, inside my skin. The little girl who knew she was the light of the world. The quiet girl who craved attention while she hoped no one would notice her standing there. The teenager who wanted to blend into the background of what was supposed to be. The angsty twenty-something who was held up by her girlfriends and CD players full of Sarah McLachlan and Ani DiFranco. The hopeful newlywed. The budding writer. The terrified new mother. All of us.
How lucky is it that we get to be all of these people? We get to fall in love, a couple times if we’re lucky, and see ourselves fresh in the soft eyes of the infatuated. We get a new chance every single day to feel sun on our faces and the weight on animals on our laps. We can laugh. We can cry when grandparents die and smile when we tell their stories, offered up in fistfuls by the selves inside. And then we toast them with our morning coffee when the music in the kitchen plays Sarah McLachlan, and we remember it all.
I can really relate to this piece. In a new phase that has unexpected challenges. Thanks for this.
Bravo!