Hovering...

This is what my life feels like right now.  I am hovering in place, furiously beating my wings, having the ability to alight to other places but currently an inability to do so.  Instead of upward movement, I am hovering in space.

I know I have the ability to make some changes.  I know I do not have to remain transfixed in time and place. I have choices.  But I feel absolutely powerless to make any real or drastic changes.  And to be fair, the here and now isn’t a bad life.  Not at all.  In fact, many would kill to have my life.  But that appreciation doesn’t change the fact that I long for something different...I am just not sure what the different actually is.  And therein lies the issue.

Middle age is a kind of last gasp.  A final moment of daring before you settle into whatever comes next for you.  The final years bringing a slowing down from which you do not recover from.  Life gets easier and harder at the same time.  Or perhaps, life always remains the same degree of hard or not, it is just the things that are hard change.

I have this incredible desire to run, pretty much anywhere.  To flee as quickly as I can to pretty much anything else.  This is not a new feeling, it has been haunting me for a good five years now.  And I have done a good job of sitting through the moments of panic and restlessness.  I have done a good job of mediating my own internal conflict.  But I will say, honestly, that the feeling is not subsiding, in fact, it is getting worse.

So, for now, I hover in place.  Poised for whatever might come next, the advance of years not promising the whatever comes next is going to be something good. And this knowledge only underscores the panic.  Time, you realize, is fleeting.  And the longer one remains in hover mode, the more time is wasted in the in between.

Hovering isn’t in of itself a bad thing, it just feels like I have been hovering around this decision for awhile.  Paralyzed by my own indecisions, conflicting emotions and loyalties.  What I want to do is clear to me, that has never wavered.  It is all the other people in my life that cause me to hover in place, fearful to let them down or to make a bad decision that ultimately hurts me in the long run.

And that is the thing about hovering, at least for me, I am never quite convinced that I should be taking off to other places, or whether I should just land where I am.  I know the effort expended, suspended in this middle place, is taxing me.  But I, at least for now, do not seem to be able to make a clear decision about what comes next...

So I hover...

Again, still...