Project137 - Day One:
What Do You Want to Leave Behind, After You Die?
Starting this off easy, are we? This question basically paralyzed me. Because? I don't know. For a long time (read: practically my whole life), I thought I knew. The answer seemed simple: leave behind a family that loves me, children, grandchildren, etc.
Hm. Then, as I came to realize that children weren't going to be part of my equation, the answer that seemed to be "simple" became a lot less so.
I have a scene in my head, where I'm walking on a path and my children, the ones I thought I'd have, walk beside me. Now, as I see the same path, the children are starting to get grainy and pixelated, projections of dreams that were mine when I was another me, the me that was so certain about "what's next". Now, the steps continue, the path stretches on, and the ghosts of the children of another's dreams grow fainter and fainter.
Were they ever really my dreams? Or was it the dream of what I'm "supposed" to do, as dictated by the societal mores in which I've been steeped? How much of that dream was an echo of my mother's declarations, "you'll understand someday, when you have your own."
Some day, some day, and days marched by, and I marched along whistling the tune of progeny in certainty. The line will continue, some day.
These days, more often than I'm comfortable, I find myself thinking of a great tree, stretching its branches, offering shade and rest, but no fruit. No fruit.
What fruit can I offer the days to come, sweet sticky liquid to delight and nurture, to embrace and embolden on their journey without me? There are no baby birds in this nest. No tender wings stretching forth to embrace the sky and shadow the sun. That dream is revealing itself to be an eclipse of me, predicted and approached and now passing by in it's time. Too late for fruit now, too late and the shadow is gone. How will I shine now, I wonder?
What do I want to leave behind? I'd love for someone to know I existed. Seems vanity to wish that my love might live on after me. Maybe not in the cherubic faces of future generations, but perhaps in the pages of a comforting tome, sitting in perfect patience, waiting to be the master that appears when the student is ready.
What Am I Waiting For?
“For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time to still be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
-Alfred d'Souza
This quote really spoke to me, as it's much of what I, too, have been waiting for. Moving through the expectations of high school and then college. Trying to get out of debt, while incurring more. Entering corporate America. Finding my mate, getting married.
All the while, wrestled with this at times paralyzing anxiety that I'm screwing up, not getting it right, just not good enough dammit. Easing through some relationships in joy and fun. Pacing through others in challenge, being bled by 1000 cuts until they left me or I them.
Throughout, exploring and embracing the ebb and flow of my spiritual life, getting ordained in the process. Then taking that ordination and trying to figure out how to be in the world.
In more recent years, I've been waiting for the right moment, that space of readiness for the next expected step of being human - procreating. Waiting and waiting, until I realized that maybe I don't want that. And working now to be at peace with that, envisioning how my life might look, since it will look completely different. A path of creation (not "pro") all my own.
What am I waiting for? I'm waiting for a new dream to emerge. Waiting to see the future me that isn't the one others tell me I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to mother something, birth something, but it isn't a tiny person of my own. The labor will perhaps be a legacy of love in script or something yet unimagined. The beginnings of a new me, it's grainy and pixelated, forming more clearly yet still undefined. I'm excited to see what I dream for myself, instead of flowing toward a dream of me given by another. It was an ill-fitted suit, a skin not my own that I'm glad to leave behind.
