I have never been so good at this. Letting it happen. I mean, it kind of does anyway...but I have this tendency, no, compulsion, to assist, control, take the reins and force life to happen.
It is as if I was born with this fundamental belief that life didn’t really know what it was doing. Like it was all bassackwards, and somehow, I, me, needed to weigh in and assist so that things could work out they way they were supposed to...
I see the arrogance now. But I didn’t for a very long time.
My mind is so quick. And my heart, seemingly starved for a love story from which novels and legends are crafted. So with my agile mind and delicate heart, I found so much of life’s progress wanting. It wasn’t fast enough, deep enough, perilous enough. I needed more, always. Which is why I was always trying to stay two steps ahead of life, helping direct it when it faltered. And it always seemed to falter. At least from my perspective.
I am amazed today at the arrogance I see in this thinking and even more shocked by how much I didn’t see it for so long. Today I sit assured that life really doesn’t need my consent, cooperation or even assistance. Life is going to do whatever life is going to do, with or without me.
Today my life unfolds more than it ever has before because I allow it and have accepted this is how life is supposed to be. And for the most part, I enjoy the process. I am content in my life and what is going on, certainly not all the time, but enough, enough so that I can see that so many wonderful things have come to pass that seemed at the time to be pretty fucking awful. And so many things have started out with such beauty and love that ended in such a terrible wreck of a disaster. Showing me time and time again that I just don’t know.
The older I get the easier it is to see that life unfolding, and me just finding the grace to accept life as it unfolds is such a gift. I am lucky to be here at all. And have defied so many odds to be still here, living after all I have endured, survived and prevailed.
What I see now that I didn’t see before in all my controlling and deciding, is that life has been and will always be this great mystery. And it isn’t that way for us to solve, but to be amazed. To be enjoyed. To be awestruck. But we humans do this thing where we take the amazing things and we make them routine, banal, and stale. We move to cities and worship things and stuff and miss the wonder of a sunset, the beauty of our children’s sleeping faces, the way our lover's embrace comforts us in the middle of the night, the cat bathing herself in early morning light.
Life does unfold. And if we are able to slow ourselves, we can see that which has always been here for us. Beauty, grace, love, interspersed with pain, sorrow and loss. Always a delicate balance between the two forces of life and death.
My life literally unfolds today and the old urges return to control, to know, to insist. But today I have a stronger wish, a more ardent desire than to know...and that is to be amazed. To be present. To be here, in this life of mine, occupying it, soaking it up, living it to the absolute fullest. Holding myself supremely accountable for loving fully and completely those beings I have been blessed to know, to love and to hold close in proximity and heart.
Today, I feel ok with all the unfolding life is doing. I feel good about life’s innate knowledge and trajectory. And, at least in this moment, feel absolutely ok with being right here in the midst of whatever fold life is doing right now.
There is nothing to know. Instead my time better spent believing in things with heart and soul and love and trust. My children, my parents, my pets, my own heart which has frightened me for so long. Freed from the terror of my own self destruction, lightened up and alive in this most magical life of mine. Perhaps we cannot truly be ok with the unfolding life, until we realize that someday, perhaps sooner than we would like, the folding and unfolding will cease and we will become something that the people we love think of in their past. Perhaps again life teaches us to appreciate all that we have by the not so gentle reminders age brings.
I am aware. I am here with most of my faculties and yearning to live, breathe, exist in every fold and to know nothing more than life will furl and unfurl over and over again until it is my stop to cease all of that.
I do not know what comes next. Only that I am here now and desire to love, hold, eat, breathe, live each moment as fully as I can. Allowing fear to take its seat at the table and offer up its portions. And then to go on anyway. Living within each fold, trusting that when the time is right, it will all unfold again. And I, I need to know nothing else except that this is the only life I know for sure I will have and I want to, when all this origami of life ceases, to know that I trusted the process. I lived each day to the best of my ability. And I loved without condition, holding back nothing and loving with my whole heart.
Perhaps that is what life unfolding is all about...holding the love over and over again as life just does what it does, one fold after another.
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