I gave my boys a ten minute warning. In reality it was meant to give me time to write out this post before we launch into what promises to be a very busy day. It is the 4th, Independence Day, and the day I am helping my partner get settled into her new home.
This too is part of the path–us being separated in a sense and growing together in a sense as we rediscover basic wants and needs. I personally am learning day by day what matters most in my universe. These are all lessons that should have been learned long ago. These are the kinds of things that people argue, “If I had it all to do over again…” Indeed I wish I’d known these things earlier and made different choices, but I am not long on regret. I am long on learning from what is. Right now what is is an opportunity still dangling out there like a brick of gold on a ledge. I need to go out of my comfort zone to get what I want in life, but I know the risk promises the satisfaction of having written that novel, of having made the family I want, of living the kind of life I aspired to live.
For a while the question has been, ‘do I really want those things?’ The question should have been. ‘am I going to put in the effort for those things?’ That feels like a more fundamental human question. They are linked, but not as people often suggest. It isn’t so much that you don’t want what you don’t fight for. It is a matter of comfort and the cobwebs that stretch across your body and the belly that rises like hot dough, and mental joints that creak from disuse. What Maslow never told us was that once you ascend the pyramid, it is very hard to look back down even a step. To displace oneself from comfort and routine is far more difficult and overlooked than I would have ever suspected.
Here we are now in this year of my rebuilding and I am learning how high I’ve sat, guarded by my fragile white picket fence in this house of cards that so easily tumbles. Here I am learning how rare and strange it is to want it to fall down.