“But in my own life, as I grew older, I realized I had only questions. For a long time this made me feel vulnerable and afraid, and then suddenly, as though I had reached an emotional puberty, it made me feel vulnerable and comfortable… What was more important was that I finally realized that making sense of my life meant, in part, accepting the shifting nature of its sands….A kind of earthquake in the center of my life shook everything up, and left me to rearrange the pieces…As the aftershocks reverberate, I have had to approach some simple tasks in new ways…Looking back at my past. Loving my husband. Raising my children. Being a woman. It is no accident that each of these tasks is couched in the present participle, that lovely part of speech that simply goes on and on and on. Oddly enough, what I have learned…is that life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It’s about muddling through the middle. That is what I’m doing now. Muddling through the middle.”
– Anna Quindlen
Thank you to Alisa Brownlow of Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake for sending me this passage, among others from the beloved Anna Quindlen.
I love this. So thank you, Alisa and Lindsey. And “muddle” is among my absolute favorite verbs 🙂
She so gets it, and yet somehow makes muddling sound like the messy but glorious adventure that it is. So glad you enjoyed! xoxo