Reflections from a midlife journey
Having the courage to quit
Much like the trees in autumn, letting go for me is a slow process. Bit by bit, though, I let go of those things whose time has passed. This is how letting go has always worked for me.
Letting go is hard even when it’s your decision to quit. It’s even harder when you’re letting go of a part of yourself.
Learning to live with death
It’s been quite the month and didn’t turn out at all as I had anticipated. Even though July tends to be a rough month for me, I was looking forward to what lay ahead. Perhaps I was lulled into a false sense of confidence because, last year, July passed with relative ease.
But no. This year, the July funk hit early and hard. The July 4th holiday was one of the most melancholy I’ve experienced. By the 5th, though, the funk already seemed to be passing, much to my relief. That relief was short-lived.
The surprising obstacle standing in my way
During my down time last month, I started asking for guidance and paying attention to the signs and messages that showed up. In the quiet, one message came through loud and clear: I had too many open loops—projects, tasks, and ideas—and these loops were draining me of the energy I needed to move forward. I also kept getting the message that there was an obstacle blocking my way. However, I couldn’t see it as such because it had become part of my landscape—familiar and beloved.
Pressing pause
I have been paying particular attention to the trees this season, which have been reminding me how slow the process of change and letting go really is. Like the trees, I still am moving slowly through my own transition. However, a couple things have become a more clear, and I’m a little surprised by the revelations.
57 and counting
There have been two times in my life when the transition from one age to the next has been challenging—mentally and emotionally. The transition from 56 to 57 has been one of those times. The other time was the transition from 34 to 35. I can’t tell you why these particular age transitions were difficult. They weren’t significant birthdays. I wasn’t transitioning from one decade to the next. Yet, these birthdays felt like thresholds somehow—that some significant change was stirring.
Blessing the in between
I was recently doing some housekeeping on my website and ran across this quote from John O’Donohue:
“… endings can be such a relief. When we suffer, we long for it to end. When we are in pain, time crawls. It also darkens and imprisons our imagination; consequently, we are unable to see beyond the suffering that plagues us. Often the greatest gift in such a situation is when someone manages to persuade the eyes of the heart to glimpse the vaguest brightening. Then the imagination takes hope from that, and constructs a path of light out of the darkness. Such endings offer great promise and bring us to the edge of new possibility. They are nascent beginnings. This is one of the fascinating characteristics of consciousness. Unlike the world of matter, in the world of spirit a whole territory that has lain fallow can become a fertile area of new potential and creativity. Time behaves differently in the domain of spirit.”
I believe that the words we need always find us when we most need them. I needed these words because this is where I find myself now.