Days in the Life of. . . .

I finally figured it out. And it is only because life, my life, has taken a turn, and I ran into a little book that may not have said anything I hadn't heard before, but somehow the way it was said, just hit my neurons the right way.  The turn is that I am out of a job in which I toiled for a quarter of a century. So long a time, that despite my own agitations and amorphous ideas about doing something else, I never really saw myself leaving it. I was wrested from it before I was ready. And it has been more traumatic than I anticipated.

The book is by Regina Brett, called "God Never Blinks, 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours".  I was reading Lesson 17, essentially about living now, not in the past or in the future.

Given the events in my life in the last two weeks, well, actually, not yet two weeks till tomorrow, more than a little detour by my reckoning, the immediate past was weighed down by hurt (mine) and the future by fear about anything you can name.

As long as I swing between these two, I will be paralyzed and unwilling to do what my friend Mr. Anonymous of the deluxe Barbara Judith Apartments recommended to me in a posting on some page, "Explore, Explore, Explore."

Did I  not say, time after time that I wanted to be FREE to do the things which appealed to a softer, creative side without reference to past or future?  I did. Did I mean it only when the opportunity had not presented itself, when it seemed, in fact, that the opportunity would never present itself?  I owe Ms. Brett my thanks that her book somehow makes me answer this question honestly. I may not have meant it then, and truth be told, I probably did not, but in this now of writing, I do mean it.

The additional hard part for me is letting go of the need to assess success and failure in my past and the grasping of success and avoidance of failure, as we humans measure it, in the future. I just had an e-mail from a colleague that reminds me of how hard  indeed that is going to be for me as to my most immediate past. I want to say, "No no, you cannot go on without me! It will never work!" But of course, they can, and they may "succeed" most wondrously without me.

So what have I figured out? Well, this much, and who knows if it will change again. Another wild shift in what, if anything, is this blog about.

I think it is about turning a rather well worn page after many years and about the journey, day to day, in the now. A journey of each day.

And, if it is ok, sharing that day in these entries.