Life is elegaic right now. Maybe it’s the closing of the school year, maybe it’s the coming of spring and the turning of another year, maybe it’s just some new shot of melancholy coursing through my veins. It’s a sad time. Things feel as achingly beautiful as this sky – blue with scattered pink clouds, light after rain, with the promise of night falling.
As I round the curve to 35 I find myself unexpectedly introspective about Life: what it means, who I want to spend it with, what I want to spend my time doing, who I want to be. How is it that I am 35, firmly in midlife, and I still feel utterly unsure about the basic questions like What I Want To Be When I Grow Up? I feel 18 and 75 simultaneously – immature, unprepared for this level of responsibility and adulthood, absolutely unqualified to raise actual children, and at the same time fragile, aware of the fleeting nature of it all, cynical and afraid in ways that only Real Life can make you.
This is surely the Middle Place, and I feel overwhelmed lately, unable to figure out how to navigate. I am trying so hard and yet so ineffectually. How can I balance the demands of those close to me, the obligations of my life, and the continued effort to figure out who the hell I am? Plus I feel an overriding sense that good God I should have figured this out by now! Didn’t I think 35 was Grown Up? Adult? The prime of life, some would say? I feel more confused and unsure than ever.
What I wish is that I could stand and admire a sky like the one above. Instead I fret about its imminent turning to dark, I worry about the rain coming back, and my mind races to all that is unknown and uncertain and scary. If only I could stand and breathe and look at the sky, at the sparkles on the cement pavement, at the guileless smiles on my childrens’ faces. How, how, how do I learn to do this? I positively ache for guidance here, so any wisdom welcome.
Seeking refuge, as I’ve been accused of lazily doing, in the words of others, I’ll share the poem that has been running through my head for days. Much like my Asbergers-esque habit of counting things (cars in a parking lot, people on a train, letters on a license plate, bottles of wine against a restaurant wall) in units of 8, I often find myself hearing short snippets of poems or quotations I know in my head. More than hearing them, actually, I see the words unspooling in my mind’s eye, over and over again (am still trying to figure out what exact font they seem to be in), as they chant themselves inside my head. Today, this is the anthem, whose images I find as terrifyingly true as its cadence is soothing:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
As Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
(Robert Frost)