“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Lin
When you have spent a good portion of your life striving to get ahead, raising a family, doing your best in the societal constructs of our times, and you come to a point of culmination – family grown, savings in the bank, learning from your past achievements and your failures, you give yourself a little timeout time to just breathe, and to bask, and to celebrate, and to reflect. And then . . . . the fear of growing stale and bored starts building up in you, and so you start to explore new things for new times. And these new things feel exciting and scary and uncomfortable and necessary if you want to continue to grow. My husband and I are starting baby steps into some new things, for this new phase of our shared lives.
Recently, my husband and I talked to each other about an older couple who lives across the street from us. Our neighbors are kind, and predictable and reliable. They are a comfort to watch them in their completely regular everyday routines. They are like a wonderful, well worn pair of your favorite slippers. But this couple is older than us – much older. We aren’t ready for “settled in our ways” yet. And so we have started considering new ideas and new interests and this is kind of unsettling. We are brushing the dust off of some of “our old ways”, and we are getting brave to explore parts of ourselves which we may have yet to discover. We are stirring things up to get “unsettled in our ways.”
If I have seemed distant and distracted on the blog lately, it’s because I am. I am propping up my courage to actively explore what I want in the next five years, and beyond. I am trying to get really real and authentic with myself, about what is working, about what isn’t working, and about what needs to change, and about what needs to be brought in, and about what needs to be let go, now that I am at the early stages of a brand new era of my life. I am starting to execute ideas that have been building in my mind, and this is exhilarating and intimidating all at once. I haven’t felt those kinds of feelings, this deeply, for a while, since I was finishing up my last stage of the first half of my adulthood. I understand that these are just the cycles of life, which keep on cycling us forward into our futures. And like all of the beginnings of my past life cycles, I am full of hopefulness and trepidation in equal measures. But the energetic momentum keeps me moving forward into new adventures. I honestly can’t wait to see what is up ahead and around the bend.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
1690. Who makes you laugh without even trying?