Changes

 We’re down to the last few days of 2024 and it’s a bit crazy to me to recall a conversation I had with friends as a teenager, envisioning how old I’d be in 2025. How 2025 was worlds away and there was no way we’d ever get there – not that we wanted to get there. We wanted to jump ahead five years, maybe ten but thirty or forty years ahead wasn’t part of the vista.  Nor should it have been.

Paige & Tony are where I was thirty years ago. Young, inexperienced, hungry (literally & figuratively) and spending every day trying to navigate being an adult… waiting for that time to come.

It never comes.

I have yet to grow up, to feel old, to be at the age where I am wise and embracing the way time seems to be vacuumed from my life, taking my youth and energy with it.

There are days when I think I’ll get there… you know, where I’m steady, breathing, calm and complacent with everything around me.

I used to think that it would come when I figured everything out about myself, embracing the ways I tried to do it – where I studied the bible and went through the whole “let go, let God” phase and it comforted me when I needed it. I let go, and He went to work. I turned out okay.

I went through the self-help books, crying and hoping, hoping and despairing. They helped for a time until I discovered Dr. Phil was and is just as fucked up as the rest of us – that the self-help books I read were written by people who were also trying to figure it out, paying for plastic surgery and Botox to make themselves feel better all while plugging their personal steps and processes to make it.

It never comes.

The knowledge, the wisdom, the security. It never comes and I’m going through another phase where I think it should never come. I mean, the beauty in this world is discoverable and the sky is different every single day – it can be pink, or red, or filled with white billowy clouds or foreboding black rain clouds. It gets noticed every day or it doesn’t. The water on the lake flows differently every day or sometimes not at all, where it’s as clear as glass, as though the world beneath it is also frozen.

Inside, memories come and memories go, and they’re never the same – there’s always a detail that gets missed with each iteration or an emotion that needs to be felt in any particular moment. The thoughts, the fears , the anxiety and the comfort are all different somehow – never the same; so how could I possibly feel old or as though I’m all grown up when nothing is stagnant?

Change is the means for giving and getting time out of this world – time for new memories, new beauty, new growth; time for old memories, remembered beauty, our youth.

I can’t wish for yesterday and I’m no longer hoping for tomorrow. I’m just sitting here, watching the sky as it changes and the lake as it flows.