What Now?

 

Telling Time

“Time is the single most important resource that we have. Every single minute that we lose is never coming back.”  Tarun Sharma

“Make room for the real important stuff.”  Tigger (Disney Book Group: Christopher Robin)

          Lately, my mind seems consumed with time, and how best to spend it. These may be only the thoughts of an old woman, but they shouldn’t be. If we all spent some time deciding what is truly important to us, we would not waste so much of it on insignificant things. According to many in the mind/body movement, our human bodies are capable of living life fully from beginning to end. Marianne Williamson wrote, “Midlife is about surrendering things that no longer matter, not because our lives are in decline, but because they are on an incline.” And, because of our elongated life expectancy, midlife extends well into to what once was considered “old age.”

          The primary question is: What is truly important? What will I do to feel that I have made the best use of the time allotted to me? I don’t want to spend this last third of life doing what Sinclair Lewis suggested so many of us do: “they set up wooden words as a barricade against roaring life!” But what exactly is “roaring life?” That seems like an individual definition. I have no desire to race around the globe seeing things I haven’t seen before. I have no so-called bucket list. But something is niggling at the back of my mind saying, “you must do something different.”

I have a friend who has just retired and bought herself a tiny camper. She will begin her travels by going to Thich Nhat Hanh’s ashram in northern Mississippi, where she will sit in meditation for a while. Hopefully that will help her answer some of these “what now?” questions.

          Every stage of life is just as important as any other, and this one seems especially potent. Once one knows themselves, has expended most of a lifetime figuring that out, hopefully, one feels comfortable in one’s own skin. Much of the angst that younger life held—who to love, what to do, where to live, with whom to live, whether to have children, how best to raise those children—all these are past, and one can look forward with an essentially clean slate. It’s both freeing and daunting. I have the uncanny feeling that this is when we truly grow up—when we are finished with the parts of life that are more-or-less scheduled, and must decide for ourselves what is truly important now. What we decide makes all the difference.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane