Making of Me

I was born today.  Well, not TODAY, but on this date.  42 years is a long time to me.  I’m amazed I’m this old, quite frankly.  Maybe it’s arrogance, but I have a surreal sense of my age, like it’s not really me aging but someone who looks like me :)

 

Since the beginning of 2013 I have gained a doctorate, lost my uterus, imploded financially, gained clarity, lost my car, gained health, lost loved ones, lost 40 pounds, gained 40 pounds, lost 10 pounds, gained more capacity to be functional and productive, and gained spiritual depth.  I would say it’s an even wash, really.  But no matter what occurs in my life or has occurred, I am choosing, today, to count my blessings, because I have so very many.  My cup runneth over. 

Madeline Le’Engle is much loved as a fiction writer, but I love her nonfiction best.  I have learned so much about myself through her contemplations over the years.  In one of her mini-essays she talks about dying many deaths in life before we die physically.  She posits that she has died many times to self-indulgence, self-devices, self-will, and self-deception, all things that make us more dead as human beings than alive. Such occurrences are never planned and are only really realized after the fact.   She goes on to demonstrate that the times when she is most fully herself are recognized by their evanescence into the staccato presentation of trials and traumas, challenges, and exertions. 

I think that I have died many deaths this year.  In each I felt I was simple an unwilling participant of a rather larger cosmic game where I had inadvertently stumbled onto the game board, but I think, after contemplating Madeline’s commentary, that though things happen in my life, to me and around me,  what I gain through the deaths I incur, is no accident.  They are either a prelude or finale of that which presents meaning.  And it is after these deaths that I realize there is more to me than I had thought.  There is more meaning in the quiet moments of reflection, the times of play with my little white dog and his ball, the interludes of beautiful music that lifts me to another place and time.

So now that I realize this, I am making plans to accept all that dies in my life that keeps me from really living so that I can more fully experience meaning in the things that fulfill me, challenge me, and give me hope.  Another year in the making of me.

Blessings

L