“Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.” ~ Sophocles
… and a father to love.
I am one to see the current state of affairs as a positive and beautiful thing. It has really helped me put things into perspective, which I’ve felt the drive to do since this year began, but my unconscious mind kept distracting me, and that created a lot of unnecessary dissonance.
Now I feel like the universe is forcing me to take a step back and really look at everything, like I talked about doing months ago.
I was always so focused on accomplishing something that I never realized how incredibly selfish that was, and I had long since made an extensive list of excuses why it was justified, which sound beautiful and honorable, but were more likely to make myself feel better for abandoning a perfectly good family to pursue my selfish dreams twenty years ago.
One of my biggest excuses was that I was trying to make the world more of a beautiful place for my kids to live in, but I’m finally beginning to see that I would accomplish more if I invested that energy into teaching these brilliant little humans how to perceive the world beautifully. Not the way I perceive it, mind you, but to look at the sides of everything, underneath and above everything, and learn to perceive things in a way that makes everything beautiful for them.
This may sound like Parenting 101 to most of you, but I never took that class because I didn’t want to do the homework, plus the obvious scheduling conflict with Life 105. It has also become painfully obvious in these times that if there is one thing art, philosophy, and history have taught us, it is that you can’t really change anything but yourself, so what AM I doing?
What difference am I ever going to make if there is nothing new under the sun, and why am I just now figuring that out when I discovered it a decade ago reading Plato? Because I’m an idiot. The only thing more humbling than realizing you’re an idiot, is learning things that are pretty much no-brainers. I've been trying to assemble a puzzle without looking at the pieces I'm holding right there in my hand.
This year I have felt lost and confused, but I am not as lost as I am losing something beautiful that I’ve been looking past, and I need my eyes to refocus on the foreground. I need to stop trying to get people to understand what I'm talking about, and look at my people standing right in front of me. Every day is a beautiful lesson, and if we are doing it right we never stop learning. I don’t imagine I’ll ever abandon my work completely, but I need to take some time to line up who I am with who I want to be.
Our plan with all this crap going on was to get out and hit some trails on a regular basis, excused by “exercise” in the quarantine guidelines, but we quickly realized that a lot of people had that plan, and what was meant to be social distancing looked more like social clustering. I have never been one to buy into the bullshit we’re fed, but the “what if?” is definitely echoing in my head, especially since I’m getting to an age where I’m “at risk” and I’m not exactly the picture of health, but my Amish blood helps a lot.
I do get the flu just about every year, and I’m always the last one to get it, but it only lasts a couple days. So when this does sweep through here, right about when everyone else is in the clear, I’ll be coughing my insides out, and I don’t imagine a couple days of rest will fix that. “What if?” becomes “not fucking worth it” pretty quick. So we’re looking at this as the universe telling us we need to appreciate our own beautiful mountain a little bit more, and hey, don’t visit. I will never live in fear, knowing that everything happens the way it is supposed to happen, and everything happens for a reason, but getting the opportunity to really look at my beautiful little family has left me understanding that I’ve been living in stupid this whole time, and I've never felt further from figuring things out. So if I disappear........... read this again.
