by Christine Gray

I have reached the middle years of my fifth decade of life. I wonder, as we all do, how much time may be left to me. While joking with a friend on the phone this morning, I asked, “What if we have another fifty years?“ “Oh my, we better start taking better care of ourselves,” she said. As if time is this arbitrary thing that ultimately has no meaning.

The reality is that time is becoming more precious to me. I am looking around and catching myself thinking about whether something I am doing is a waste of the last years of my life, or if it is meaningful enough to me to continue. I do it with the smallest things as well as the big. Is this TV show worth watching? Is this book worth finishing? What would I want to be doing if I knew, really knew, that I had less time to waste?

This kind of thinking never really meant anything to me before. I’ve read many different versions of this meaning of life story. I’ve had friends and family whose lives ran out before they finished what they wanted to do. But not until now has this penetrated down to the place in me where I feel it in my heart. I wonder about what is most important to me and how to honor it or them, how to let the people I love know precisely how precious they are to me.

My mother used to say this to me and my siblings to mock us, to insult us when she felt we hadn’t lived up to her expectations. She would call us retarded or late bloomers when she felt we didn’t do something she had done until years later in our lives. In short she was telling us our lives had not met her timeline for us. Every once in a while I think about what she might have meant, if I could only get beyond the insult. I wonder if I am a late bloomer when it comes to the idea of taking time seriously.

Life doesn’t go on forever. So now I am finally looking over mine and thinking, what have I not done? I guess I’m not really in the mood for regret. That seems such a colossal waste of time. I am, looking around at what I love. Do my children know how precious they are to me? Do my friends know the depth and richness they create in my life by giving me a place to be who I truly am? Am I able to allow myself to feel the gratitude this kind of questioning sets up in my heart? It adds real depth to the most ordinary experience. I stop and marvel at the beauty of each sharp green needle soaking in the sun on my huge Ponderosa pine when I take out the garbage in the morning. The repetitive sounds of my dogs’ soft breathing as they sleep in my nearly silent house feel precious in this moment.

What happened to set me up this pensive place tonight? I read a simple line in a book. The point was about the reality of parents getting old, and how we as children might feel about it. I realized that I, too, am a parent getting old. My own parents are both dead. What thought would I like to leave with my children after I am gone? I’d like to leave them the certainty that they were dearly loved. I’d like to leave them with a taste of who I might really be, or who I perceive myself to be. Not so much because it is majorly important to me to leave a legacy behind for them to cling to, but because now that my own mother is gone, I wonder who she really was. She seemed so determined to hide, especially from her own children.

I guess I am asking myself more seriously these days just exactly who could I possibly be. Do I even know myself? It hardly seems to matter when I sit on my deck in the shade and listen to the house sparrows chirping in the Aspen a few feet from me. Or when the thunder rattles the windows in my house on a hot August afternoon just before the rain starts to pour down. But I am not always so expansive, sitting in the present moment. Sometimes I do wonder about the meaning of life, especially my own. I get bogged down and feel like there is something I should be doing, if I only knew what it was.

I’ve decided it’s not really my job to mire myself in the introspective mud of what I have or haven’t done, who I might or might not be. I am instead grateful for the prodding that comes from reading lines as I did tonight, that make me put down the book and instead fire up my laptop. I write down what seeks to move through me. I am left with no illusions as to my personal greatness. All I have to do is walk out into my driveway and look at the bits of snow still capping the great Rocky Mountains to the west to remember greatness is a relative thing.

I participated in a once in a lifetime experience this summer. I went on a vision quest and spent 48 hours alone with myself in a six foot circle of sage. I was surrounded by magnificent red rock cliffs and quaking Aspen leaves and the buzzing of bottle flies. Time came to a screeching halt. I wasn’t young or old, or more or less aware of anything in particular. I just was. The days were hot and the nights weren’t. Rocks stabbed my back and shoulders when I lay down, and my butt got tired of sitting on the log that crossed through my space.

These were certainly things to complain about if I had wanted to Instead I was just glad to be there and doing what I was doing, even when it stretched beyond what I thought I could endure. And that’s really the point for me these days. I’m glad to still be here, alive and able to think about the time passing me by. Gratefully, I am enfolded in the sacred love of friends and family.

Today I want to remember to take the time to tell people they matter to me. Not just once in a while but everyday. I want to be present to the warmth of the sun on the top of my head, the sound of the crickets on a still night. One little sentence in a book reaching out to me has the power to make me feel so good. In the now everything is so precious, so dear, and so perfect. How rarely I visit this inner place. How simple it is to get here.

Blessings to you, my friend.