24 days.
24 days of packing, waiting, planning, saying goodbye, promising to see each other again, writing letters, burning some, sending some, parting gifts, shedding surplus. Nostalgia, joy, anxiety, great expectations, fear, excitement. If the next 24 days will be anything like the past 17 (give or take two months), this is what is awaiting until the day we will be packing up the car and getting on the road to our next adventure.
One of my greatest fears has always been to linger in the messy middle, alone with just me as a companion. I did much, much better on peaks. Peaks of endless work, crowds I would have to put up a front for, crawling out of my skin to do anything lest I would get to feel my feelings.
Little by little I worked to shed the layers: I stopped drinking any alchool over two years ago, I quit toxic jobs where being a workaholic was celebrated, I set a clear intention to not spend time scrolling and signed up to language learning instead, I stopped watching TV and replaced it with reading and cleared my home of carbs. I am therefore raw, sitting with my feelings, in the in betweens. Cruel. And … essential.
For the past three weeks I have been out of a job, waiting for a new chapter to start. Home alone, navigating bouts of planning, clenched jaw moments, boredom, looking truth in the face, looking away, carrying out hard conversations in my head or on paper, saying goodbye, saying hello, surfing this messy middle as best as I could.
I wish I could say I have a recipe for the best way to face the messy middle but the truth is I am still very much in it and just wanted to send a message to the universe recognizing this is a real challenge. I look back to the past and relive it, I get furious, I accept as much as I can, forgive less than I wish I could, try to hold on tight to my learning. I look ahead to a future I pretend to be able to guess and get equal parts excited and anxious, innundated by floods of thoughts ranging from “I will have the time of my life” to “what if I screw everything up?”
Walking my dogs this morning I remembered that, not only is this messy middle the only thing that I actually have, it is the part where life actually happens and that I’d better pay attention and stop running from it in so many other directions. Before I know it, 24 days of my life will become past and another future will be there to equal parts scare and excite me.
I know I have not discovered another America here, we hear this more often than we probably care to: the present is all we have. As simple as it sounds, it has been THE lesson that my life of four and a half decades has been trying to teach me day in and day out. I hope life never gets tired of teaching me because this lesson continues to be one tough nut to crack.
Photo by Brandon Day on Unsplash
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