We live our younger lives, instinctually learning, studying books, ever preparing; plans and strategies seem to make sense. A robust social hunger, a pliant mind, and an elastic sensual body sets the table for supper to feed you, enrich your psyche, and broaden you.
However, moving forth in age, the invincible self erodes, and aspirations fade away like mists in sunlight. We learn uninvited lessons, hopefully gaining grace and kindness to some degree. Over our years, events occur, battles are lost or won, but are always paid for. Injustice and disappointment absorb the former hunger of those keen plans, mitigated by intruding reality; and that tattered bravado recedes, but not entirely.
People you know, young and old, die. Small catastrophes claim you. You humbly learn those stinging chapters where not only is life not fair, but it is teeming with deceit, agony, fraud and and not a little humor.
So you cloak yourself in a fabric woven with existence riddles and irony. You present a little laughter, a small measure of stifled hysteria, and brandish cautious celebration. Joy remains but is tempered now with a gradual surrender to those changes you cannot actuate.
Next you set your brave boat to coordinates of resilience and steer the rudder to family harbors, coves of compassion; taking onboard friends, dogs, and supplies that please and comfort you. You control not the winds, nor the tides, not anything but your own humbled boat. Yet the sun is out there too, the fish and birds, your prayers, and stars to guide you.
revised 3/2014
5/29/10
