You can't make it go faster. You can't skip steps. You've just got to live it with as much grace as possible. Endings are crazy like that. I imagine if I had the luxury of movie-screen reviews of all the assorted episodes my life has spawned thus far, I might be able to pick out where the endings ended and where the beginnings got started. But right in the middle of it, my head just feels squished.
I am very aware of my own birthday this year - it falls on the first day after I am no longer working as an accountant at Silver Creek. It falls on the day that I'll take a road trip with my oldest child who is entering her Senior year of High School - confident and shiny and choosing for herself what her beginnings will look like. We are driving to the other side of the state to witness the Parade Review of my youngest child who is entering her first year of High School - determined to shape a life for herself that fits rather than fitting into the life in which she finds herself. We leave the tending of the farm to my true love who says that here, in this third half of his life, he's going to do what he wants.
It all feels rather intense but I know that it will be quick. And that soon, I'll even be through the beginning, immersed in my new normal. So it seems important to look around at this moment, to notice everything. I don't want to skip any steps. It occurs to me that this ending-beginning that I think is just about starting a new job might be part of an ending-beginning that I can't even see yet. In these last weeks before my birthday, I feel more like I am participating with the ending than ever before. Beginnings are easy for me to jump into full-on, to try on the new wardrobe and begin speaking the new lingo. Maybe it's because I'm older this year, but it feels more like choosing the endings than taking on the beginnings.
Ahhhh, here I am trying to use words on a flat screen to describe the chaotic inbreath before a new life starts. What I set out to do in today's post was to share this passage from "Now You See It" by Cathy Davidson:
"Learning, in this sense, is skill and will, an earned conviction that, faced with a challenge ahead, this past achievement will get one through. You can count on your ability to learn, and nowhere is that more important than when what you've learned in the past no longer suffices for the future. That is the glistening paradox of great education: It is not about answering test questions. It is about knowing that, when tested by the most grueling challenges ahead, you have the capacity to learn what is required to succeed.
It is in this sense that unlearning is a skill as vital as learning. It is a skill you have to acquire, too. Unlearning requires that you take an inventory of your changed situation, that you take an inventory of your current repertoire of skills, and that you have the confidence to see your shortcomings and repair them. Without confidence in your ability to learn something new, it is almost impossible to see what you have to change in order to succeed against a new challenge...Confidence in your ability to learn is confidence in your ability to unlearn, to switch assumptions or methods or partnerships in order to do better."I think that's what feels different this year - I'm more confident in my ability to choose for myself how my endings will look, the unraveling of "normal" is just as exciting and full of potential as the opening up of the new way of being. Letting a routine, whether it's a habit of behavior or a way of thinking, dissolve back into its essential pieces is rather thrilling...IF... I am not afraid of being left without anything to hold onto. If I am confident in the pieces and not just the entire complete picture, why, then I could rearrange my favorite pieces into just about anything!
I think that Jeff, who is indeed one year older than I am already, knows what he is talking about.
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