I was reviewing my life yesterday as I sat with the goats. I started crying. I feel like that a lot lately. Just moved to the point of tears. Sometimes they are happy, sometimes they are sad. But I feel like I am getting more weepy the older I get.
It is like I feel broken more often. Like the facade I have had going all this time is being punctuated. Like it I wasn’t paying attention to all the beautiful, wonderful sad and heart rendering things that were going on before. Somehow, I had this shield that prevented from any of it really getting to me.
Lately, it has all been getting to me. I feel like I am on the verge of tears far more often than I used to be. Things that used to just piss me off, now make me cry. This is a weird shift for someone who didn’t cry for several decades...
As I was sitting there, completely enveloped in baby goat love, I thought this...
If I was really paying attention, I would be crying all the time. At all the beautiful sadness, at all those moments sublime. At all those wonderful moments in a day where I am present. I would cry at my mistakes more often instead of attempt to find excuses that allow me to continue to live the way I do. I would see all the brokenness in myself and others and instead of being upset by it, I would see the commonality and humanness.
Recently, I have been called out on some rather gross behavior on my part. And I can do nothing about it except stop it. I can do the work to see why I engaged the way I did. I can do the work to become a different person so I that I don’t behave like that again. But I can’t fix what I did. I can’t change it. I can’t make it better. I can’t do anything but be truly sorry and try again today to not be that person anymore. Right now I can’t even say I am sorry because the words would mean nothing. I am sorry. I was wrong. I was behaving in a manner that was not congruent with the rest of my life. I see it. I did it. I can’t change what I did. I can only change where I go from here.
The more of life I get to experience, the more opportunities I get to have to see where I am less than who I want to be. Which gives me a lot to work with. A lot to work on. And more often than not, it leaves me feeling a bit destroyed. Not in a bad way actually. In a perspective shifting way.
I am far from perfect. I screw up all the time. In big ways, in small ways. In many ways. And more than ever before, my own humanness affects me. I do not feel so compelled to try to regain ground I feel I have lost. Instead, being more content with just letting it all fall down around me. And tears are apparently part of that. And for once, I find myself truly grateful for another means of expression. That I am not able to just stuff it all into outrage or anger or “fuck it”. Instead there appears to be some new pathways for life that did not exist before inside me.
I will own that all this change has me unsure of who I am. That I feel unmoored from myself in some fundamental ways. Perhaps this is my version of a mid-life crisis. Perhaps it is just a not so subtle change in my life’s path. A shedding one more time of all that I think that I need, that I am being shown that I do not. Feels like I have been here before, again.
So I am just going to cry the tears that come more often now. I am going to allow the armor of self protection to fall away. I am going to just embrace all the fucked up shit that I still do as being the best teachers I could ever ask for...and continue to try to do it better. And pray that I am actually able to do that so that I can become a better version of myself.
