What’s Comes Softly

"I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
---Nothing happens? or has everything
happened,
and we are standing now, quietly,
in the new life?
Oceans, Juan Ramon Jimenez
 

Even though there are official dates that proclaim the arrival of the first day of the seasons — based on the ancient turns in the heavens—the seasons themselves melt into each other without our awareness of the specific moment when that occurs. We simply awake one morning to find daffodils pushing up or look out into the evening and see flashes of lightning bugs, or feel the tang of cool air after weeks of heavy heat.

It's the same with our own lives. We become so captured by the short term, that the larger sweep of change occurring in us may go unrecognized until, mirroring the inevitability of the seasons, it arrives on our doorstep. Even though we may be constantly making plans about the future: tomorrow, next week, next month, when the kids go off to college, for the most part we are focused on the life we are living now. Then one morning, we look at our children and see instead grown men and women; or we realize we are only a year from retirement, or the parents we thought were immortal, are gently folding their tents. Just as it happens in the beautiful Real World, these things don't come overnight, but are built moment by moment until following a time table we cannot see, a fullness is reached and our lives too, shift into a new season. Some changes arrive in sudden events, but most simply arrive quietly as our children grow and leave, our jobs change and end, our bodies lean into a softer version of themselves. Even in the wake of the dramatic changes implicit in illness, death or divorce, or from moving, retiring, changing jobs, the arc of living keeps us moving. How we have adjusted or lived through what has happened to us is a reflection we receive only in retrospect.

There are many feelings when a major aspect of our life changes: wonder at where the time went, amazement at the breadth of what we may have lived through, tenderness and poignancy and perhaps even sadness over the end of huge portions of our existence that we had dedicated ourselves to so intently. But the nature of life is growth and change—beginnings and endings. Mixed in with all our feelings about what is over, we can discover a new way of being is always arriving, even in the hardest and most painful shifts. What ends now comes with an invitation for something new. It may feel very different, but it carries its own richness and potential. Looking back over our lives offers an opportunity to see more of the overall shape of who we are, to consider what has mattered the most to us and hopefully to gather that understanding to carry with us as we turn our gaze towards what we can still do with the seasons remaining to us. A part of our life may be over, but the call to live remains.

"For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day" Longfellow