It takes a long time to grow young. ~Pablo Picasso
Let’s not talk about birthdays in a time of a worldwide pandemic.
Let’s not talk about birthdays in the crazy-ass year of our Lord 2020.
Let’s not talk about birthdays in the way they suppress and bind us to a social-construct of age in carefully measured hours and days without care or concern for any measure of wisdom or grace or humility.
Instead, let’s talk about a birthday that arrives like the top of a mountain after a long journey. I thought I’d look around and be able to see the whole world from here, when in fact there’s so much fog I can barely see through to yesterday. More surprising is that above the fog line is not a clear vista, only more mountaintops, some even higher than the one I’ve spent months climbing. I can choose to do this all over again, to climb to higher points, or simply different points. I can also shatter the traditional paths and hop right onto a staircase of clouds, bouncing from bank to bank, only to find what looked so soft and solid and sure dissipate the closer I got to it.
Maybe I would step onto a gale and let it fling me into a cold rain.
Maybe I would grab a strike of lightning and all its jagged, angular energy.
Maybe I would hitch a ride on the rising sun, or latch onto the falling moon, or swing a lasso of stars to capture passage to another galaxy.
Or maybe I’ll simply stay where I am, at the end of a year’s journey around the sun, and the dawn of another trip around its orbit. It feels like I am standing in a very different place. A frightening place. An exhilarating place. A promising place. And a better place.
A place where I’m a little more sure of myself, and in ways that are genuinely healthier and more enjoyable than poses of the past. A place where I can admit the many ways I’ve been wrong, the ways I’ve been mistaken, the ways I’ve failed and faltered. A place where if I may not be able to fully embrace the imperfect, I can at least acknowledge and make motions to move toward embracing it. A place where I can work on forgiveness, and work on saying when I’m sorry.
This isn’t a place that’s fixed in any singular location or time, it occupies neither space nor history, and maybe that’s why I never got a glimpse of it until recently ~ and I’ve only had the briefest of glimpses. To be fair, I’m not even entirely sure of what exactly I’ve seen, but there is wisdom in that; knowledge of what you lack is always more important than knowledge of what you think you already have.
In these last few months, when I’ve been more alone than ever ~ as we have all been ~ I realized the scary and liberating sense that we may have to be on our own, that being alone and finding solace in solitude is not only about survival, it’s about growth, about becoming something better, finding purpose, and finding meaning. Not everyone is going to understand or want to be a part of it. That’s ok. Love is sometimes about letting go, even of the people you thought would be with you for life. Because they will be ~ at least, they can be, if you allow it, if you learn how to hold them in your heart. If that means letting some of them go, that’s not necessarily an ending. And when you understand that, it’s less sad and sorrowful, and more of a reason to find the joy that remains. In some circumstances, a greater love will reveal itself, as the closer we get to truth and freedom, the closer we get to love.
Everybody wants a happy ending ~ and we seem to believe it’™s the ending part that is most important. We seek out some sort of definitive resolution, some finale that ties up all the loose ends and wraps everything up in a pretty bow. I think we have it backward ~ it’s the happy that should matter most, not the ending. At the ripe age of 45, I’m only beginning to find that happiness in those loose ends, in the unresolved tensions of a day, in the messy unfinished chaos that means we have another day to make everything better. It means that we are alive, that we are still here, still making mistakes in the muck. And it is a most beautiful muck…
