Welcome to your forties. Where a flesh eating bacteria can kill you, chivalry is dead but polyamory isn’t and nesting without anyone in it, is a thing.
The past few weeks have been interesting, to say the least.
I’m starting to believe that we come into life to learn. Not to achieve, not to win, not to be right, but to simply understand. That’s it. That is literally all there is to it. So, be teachable for goodness sake. None of us really know what we’re meant to do here. We pretend, a lot. We keep busy and think going to work and coming home and making up ideas to save the planet is important. This might be true, but who really knows. NO ONE.
So why are we so confident in telling others how to live? Have you done this before? Did you know that every day you wake up is yet another day in your life that you have never been before?! What a mind-bend. How could one lose ones childlike wonder for the world if this was kept in view throughout ones life?
But as adults, we do. We forget. We stop playing. We break under the pressure of responsibility and we allow outdated broken systems to kill our spirits and our zest for life. There must be a bridge somewhere, to bridge the gap between childhood and adulting. A bridge that one can oscillate between the two. I’ve spent half my life searching for it, gung-ho about it actually because for the longest time I didn’t want to grow up. Adult life just quite simply didn’t make sense to me. A bunch of serious people, pretending to be important, with no time for anything but work and wine or whine for that matter, what was the point of it all? Why grow up if that’s what it looks like? I never wanted to sacrifice my childlike excitement for the things of adulthood, it just didn’t seem fair and if that was what adulting demanded of us all, I didn’t want it.
Over the past five years I have had the wonderful privilege of figuring out how to adult my way. Has it been hard? The hardest. Because of all the conditioning we pick up along the way, we lose a lot of our own fire and flair. It’s only much later in life that we truly seem to come into our own. It’s a rather marvelous homecoming. I often feel like I didn’t do any of the things that were expected of me as a human so imagine the shock when I found out that there isn’t only one way to human. How do you have relief and terror hold hands in that exact moment?
We rely so heavily on frameworks and rigid ideas of how things should be. And we force ourselves and others into it. But did you know that just outside of those frameworks love, acceptance and peace reside. We push and pull for things to fit because uhm…ask yourself why? We need to unlearn so much in order to be here, to truly be here. To truly understand what it means to live.
I am going through a pretty big transition in my life. There is a lot of letting go. So much so that I happen to find myself in the middle of the biggest creative block I have ever experienced. My identity has been rooted in creativity since I can remember. It used to be my lifeline, life raft, survival tool. I used to cling to it as if my life depended on it. But it’s busy shifting. And I am finding myself in a place where everything that was true and right no longer is. My only explanation for this is that I am finally stepping out of survival mode. All the things that I used to do to keep the wheels of life churning no longer seem applicable, the manuals pages are blank and they are inviting me to write in it anew.
My body fell apart a few weeks ago. A frozen shoulder with spine out of alignment, a rib and hip out of joint forced me to be still. The week after I contracted a bacterial infection on my face, it spread like wild-fire and if I didn’t get to the doctor when I did my face and my health could have been in serious trouble. February has been spent slowing down in more ways than one. Stillness in body, at home and in heart.
Learning is all there is to life. Pivotal.