Lately life has had this dependability quality to it. Or rather, I have been viewing life like that. How much of it do I have left? Since the time is limited, where do I want to spend my time?
Nature. With people I love who love me back. Reading. Writing. Time with animals.
This is not how I spend the majority of my time...
I still feel like I am wasting too much time. Way too much time on things that do not really absorb into my life. Peripheral things that are not soul touching,
Seems that far too often life feels like it is glancing off of me...not really soaking in. It isn’t true but it is a feeling I have more and more often.
I am feeling like I want to chuck it all...again. To eschew the shackles of this modern life, and get in the RV and go. I felt it acutely last year and now I am feeling it again. The call of the wild. Disappearing from the norm, the regular. It feels like the regular is a barrier to really allowing life to seep into me.
The perils of daily living, great but benign. Do this, do that. Buy this, buy that. Wear this, wear that. I feel almost like life is draining out of me in not so tiny increments with each this and that.
What is this need to run away? Where does it come from? Why does it leave?
I am not sure. The accumulation of days feels like pressure - each day I put forth wearing the yoke of habit, working, existing, living another day closer to death. Morbid. Yep. But I feel the steps toward the grave and I think I should at least mention it since it has begun to dog my daily life steps.
I don’t mean to seem dramatic or overly emotional. We are all going to die but no one wants to talk about it. We all (I am totally including myself here) run around trying to maintain youth, but it slips from us all. Every single day...and we spend the precious time we have left focused on things that do not allow life to absorb...instead allowing life to sheer off of us like a fly against glass.
This is not a gauntlet to you. It is a call out to myself:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?
I say to myself. And far too often, I have no reply.
Why do I put up impenetrable barriers to the whole of life as it comes, accepting the good and the bad in equal humor?
I was standing in a dressing room the other day, trying on clothes that I did not need or really even want. And I noticed changes in my body that must have been there for awhile but in my routine life, I missed, ignored, refused to see. But there in a foreign dressing room I saw that which I wanted to avoid. So I stood there while every part of myself wanted to hurry it away. I saw the sag, I saw the wearing lines in my face. I was awash with emotion. Noticing how much I wanted it to be different. To be perkier, more svelte. More youthful. But I stood there transfixed with my horror and shock, understanding that I can fight it but I will never win. Time takes what time takes and you can beat it back but aging is like kudzu in the south...its tendrils reappear overnight. Unimaginable growth or in this case age.
I suppose I want to begin to think of age as something to prize...much like a beloved aged pet. The pet made it to elderly because I took such good care of it. Its age, testamentary to the love felt. Perhaps I can look at my sagging skin, the wrinkles and fine lines in a similar manner. They are evidence of the care taken and not taken for myself. That perhaps our faces in particular show the concern we have held for ourselves in our lives. Whether life was absorbed or was it just processed...perhaps our bodies are here to show us that if we pay attention.
