Today, I wait for my car to be released from a crushing lot of repairs, dreaming of the shore and sea breezes – so close to my week and 1/2 by the sea, friends, celebrations, kayaks, reunions, the best parts of my best summer memories all happened in August, at a big rambling house on the bay. I am so close…. but I am swimming in life’s riptide lately.
I want to believe the world worked better once – post 2020, life is a lot of missing parts, delayed trucks and the need for a kind of patience, well, let it be known that I am more spontaneous hare, impetuously racing ahead, than the cautious tortoise, who plods along and wins the race.
Here’s the thing, as I approach my birthday – this next year, I really have tortoise aspirations, a nice steady, low stress, plod a long – taking in the sights and enjoying the walk.
I keep saying at work, play the long game, don’t fret the battles, win the war – if my 90+ year old mother gave me artist talent, she couched that with endless metaphors and the one liner that favor a pre-this century, sort of strange military speak – her WW II adolescence to blame. I also say daily, less is more so we’ll see how that works out.
I know we’re all seeing the theme here so let me really beat it down, in and around – about that rip tide. I’ve never been in one, I have seen the ripples on the water and hopefully the right thing to do when confronted by one is deeply programmed into my mind but wait for it.
If you google “how to survive a rip tide” – these are the sentences you get: don’t fight the pull, stay calm, call for help, try to keep your feet on the bottom, let your body flow in the direction where the current is going, and the stunner: it’s better to be swept away from shore and live, then die trying to swim against it.
For all my middle aged, sandwich Gen Xers, umm, yeah, that, as the youths say, slaps.
It’s starting to be very clear that this time in life, it’s a lot of things but some of it for sure is learning how to just swim in a way that feels weird and not good, to see the familiar shore get more distant, trusting in the current to flow, to just calmly, methodically work free. And to be that tortoise, slowly and steadily, seeing and breathing in and out as the bumps, the current, the things (oh the endless, non-functional things) get sorted out. Willing, wanting, pushing, fighting – nope.
As my favorite yoga teacher says, I know I am breathing in, I know I am breathing out and going to keep swimming sideways until I get it.
PS. I will return to travels and funny stories soon – Scottish Highlands are calling me in September, November will see a return to Prague and Vienna, and I am always just a few months off of planning to get back to Iceland, my true love.
LIONSANDCOWS 