The One Thing I Know for Sure.......

Life keeps moving, whether you want it to or not.  Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years.  Funny, I don't feel any older than I did at 21, but this year makes me 30.  I often look around wondering where the time went, and sadly, each passing year it flies faster.  I guess our lives are like sand in your palm.  You can hold it only awhile before it slips silently out of your grasp.

I wonder if I will still feel the same in another 10 years, when I have a 21 year old daughter?  Will I feel as I do today, a 21 year old, stuck in someone else's aging body?  All along though, there are the constants that provide comfort.  The man that has slept across the bed for me for 12 years, wow, he is almost 30 too.  The 3 children, that for a while will still need me, but it will never be for long enough.  The friends that are aging with me, and helping me laugh away some of this time.  The house we have made a home together.  With a Mom and a Dad, 3 kids,  2 dogs, a swing set, and a picnic table.  In so many ways ordinary, but in so many ways extraordinary.

It seems like all I did was blink, and here I am.  It passed so slowly as a child, I came to fear I would never gain freedom.  I would live under my father's tyrannical rule forever.  Constantly longing to grow up, I wish I could go back and tell that child to calm down.  Wait a minute, enjoy it a little more, it will all be gone before you know it.  Alas, that is the catch 22 of this life.  In an effort to grow up a little more quickly we try to speed it up, and in order to beat the clock of age, we later try to slow it down again.  But the joke is on us.  Time marches on.......with or without us.  I guess it's a trip I'll have to take, and try not to blink, it's gone.

You mean this might go on for 92 f&%$king years???

The new job I have gotten has given me more quiet than I have had in a long time.  I spend my days playing scrabble with a 92 year old women, at least until she dozes off, which renders me unable to move in fear that I wake her.  So I am left with my thoughts.  I have not been sticking to my "food lifestyle plan" as diligently as I had hoped.  Let's just say I have really given it the heave-ho.  I don't want that, I want to do it.  No, I don't.  It took me one month to gain back 10 lbs.  And that, my friends, is the struggle.  My exhausting search for BALANCE.  I am either tottering on the edge of despair, or bubbling on the verge of elation.  I am either pigging out, or strictly limiting myself.  I am neither here nor there, which get's me no where.

I want to enjoy life.  I want to laugh, drink, eat, walk my dogs, play scrabble, drink coffee, bake, and nap on rainy days.  I want to do these things at appropriate times, feel things in the moment, and then let them go into the universe.  Not chew on them until any semblance of flavor is long since made it's exit.  Why is it so hard?  I find moments.  I get fleeting glimpses, then I fall back into the old patterns again.  I find success, only to sabotage it.  I find happiness, only to question it.  And I find food, and I eat it.
 
So, maybe this break from the healthy lifestyle is needed.  Maybe it is a lesson in humility.  Maybe it's time to face the fact that this is it, and I can't do it.  Or somewhere deep down I really don't want to.  I just crave this balance, it's almost a mirage to me.  I know it exists and I get close, only to have it disappear as if it was never even there.  So what have I learned so far on this journey?  I have to say I am more self aware.  I have never spent so much time in my own head as I have these past few months.  And though, it can be a scary place sometimes, there are really beautiful places too.  

I have to say that I am okay with the person I am, maybe not physically, but deep down in my heart I love my personality.  I am very confused spiritually though, and that is part of the problem.  My inability to connect to anything that requires faith troubles me, and begs me to wonder what happened to the Christian girl with unwavering faith that I used to be?  Did God forget about me?  Or was he ever even there?  All questions I need to explore further.  Maybe I forgot about God.  Maybe the question is the answer.  I do know one thing for sure.....it will take a lifetime to figure all this out.  Maybe I need to take a lesson from the wise old woman I now care for, seize the moments.  Whether they are to play scrabble with a willing opponent, or take a cat nap in the sun while sitting in your favorite chair, take each breath deliberately.  And hope the rest sorts itself out......