Challenged

Finding myself facing a challenge many of my older friends deal with as they stretch up there in years - the things that clamor for my attention now are different from the ones that loomed large in my earlier years.  What calls out for doing now tends to get crowded out by what's familiar but doesn't really serve much, if at all, any more.  

My mother was a master of dropping - without apparent qualm or question - parts of life that she'd outgrown.  She just released them in order to lay hold on something new.  Catch & release, catch & release - Mom lived life as a continuing adventure, not as an increasingly limited experience.  

It's strange amazing bodacious - to do what means the world to me requires that I model the very behaviors long promoted to my older friends.  Recognize the parts of life that never have worked & ditch 'em.  Appreciate the parts that once worked yet don't now & bid them a grateful adieu.  Recognize the parts that work but that get in the way of doing things that work even better, say my thanks, then my farewells.  Notice the parts that work really well, but don't spark joy - embrace them, let them know how much they brought to my life, then leave them in yesterday.

This is NOT easy to do.  The familiar is comfy & assuring & safe.  But my reality is that there is so much out there sparking my joy, calling for my attention energy action, that its time for things to go.  Things that defined me.  

 

This morning, am finding myself relating big time to something Mom wrote in July 2000:
ME is changing so fast it is hard to keep up at times.  It feels like more bubbles up to the surface than ever before - well, since I fell in love, married and became a mom for the first time.  We are even trying to  put together my very own web site, which seems ... well, I do not know what  it seems, but it does.  

Talk about "the times today are a'changing"  ~ who'd  'a thunk that I would set foot anywhere near a meeting of people considering  the role of women within the General Church, but there I was Monday evening,  feeling right at home, sitting front and center, and enjoying it immensely.

Mom wrote, "Changing roles and changing identities can be rough on everyone."  What I'm discovering is how rough it can be on ME - how hard it is to let go of what was in order to make a space for what can be.  It takes letting go of the familiar in trusting expectation of what doesn't exist at this moment.  It's throwing a football to a spot where no one is at the moment it leaves your hand.  

The times today are a'changin' - Mom released the familiar to welcome the current moment.  What better way to pay tribute to her - and express trust in the me who is to come - than to embrace the challenge & do the same. 

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