One Life to Live – And it’s not a daytime drama! (or maybe it is!)
“Every ending is a beginning to something.” We don’t often know exactly what it is.
Ah Yes. So beautiful. So, poetic. Deep.
Also… hella unhelpful when your life feels like it is falling apart.
It is true. In this life, there will be a lot of beginnings and endings. I know. Sometimes an ending doesn’t feel like a beginning. It feels like someone turned off the lights, took the furniture, and left you sitting on the floor wondering how you got here… and how you’re going to get the hell up with those bad knees and non-existent upper body strength.
Get up.
YOU ARE NOT A CAT. And you do NOT have nine lives. (Quiet as it’s kept, they don’t either! They just have a reputation of having crazy survival skills and almost magical ability to land on their feet. hmmmmm I might have been a cat in another life!)
You’ve got one.
And this one life is not a soap opera where you can disappear for five years, come back with a new face, a new husband, and a suspicious accent. There is no dramatic organ music. No commercial break. No “previously, on your life…” (other than the re-runs on constant loop in your mind!)
This is it. Real time. The only time.
I was talking about this with my friend on my now-daily commute. When we hung up, she sent me a Facebook video of a 101-year-old woman who said she was “winding down and at the end of the road.” She said she was in a hospital bed with one window and one patch of sky. She was offering up some good advice as our elders who have lived, often do. She said, unlike most living folk, she could see the entire road behind her, complete with every wrong turn. I am sure if you live to be 101, you made plenty of wrong turns, but clearly if you lived to be 101, you did something right!
She spoke about her ending. One of the things that really hit me was when she shared her thoughts on time. (Hopefully, I won’t get myself in trouble quoting her like this, but I wanted to share.)
“Right now, you believe somewhere deep and unspoken that you have time. It is in everything you do. The trip you will take some day. The apology you will give when the moment feels right. The real life you will start once the next thing falls into place. The person you will become when you finally lose the weight, get the promotion, pay off the debt, fix the relationship. You believe time is yours. A resource you can spend later when it is more convenient. It is not. Time was never yours. It was only lent to you, and the loan is shorter than anyone tells you. When you are young nobody sits a 25-year-old down and says you have roughly 4000 weeks. Not one of them is guaranteed. Use them now. They let you believe the road stretches out forever. It does not. I know this because I am at the end of it and it arrived faster than any dream I ever had. One moment I was young and certain. I had plans. I had time. I had my whole life ahead of me, then I blinked and now I am here in this bed with machines beeping around me and a window that shows me the same patch of sky every single day. The road ends for everyone. The only question is what you did while you were walking it.”
One of the hardest things might turn out to be grieving the life you didn’t live. There is no funeral. No closure. Just a quiet, lingering awareness that time has passed… and it’s not coming back.
The roads you didn’t take. The chances you didn’t grab. The version of you that existed only in your imagination, living her best life somewhere in an alternate universe where everything went according to plan.
There’s a particular sting to realizing that some doors didn’t just close… they locked, bolted, and the building has been demolished.
Find a window or perhaps you’re just outside of the wrong door.
So yes, “every ending is a beginning.” Probably less “fresh start” and more “well… now what?” (hmmmm. Where have I heard those words recently? Oh yeah….
Sometimes that beginning looks like confusion. Or starting over when you’re tired.
Or reinventing yourself when you were finally getting comfortable.
COMFORT?
Maybe curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Comfort did!
You hear comfort spoken about as a goal. But is it? “I just want to be comfortable.” You want to make someone dying comfortable. But do we really just want to be, “comfortable, when we’re trying to live fully?” I should be comfortable. I live in a nice home. I’m pretty healthy and capable. I have about 18 jobs and manage to make ends meet. By all accounts, many would think I should be comfortable. (As comfortable as anyone with 18 jobs could be. I’m kidding about the 18 jobs, but have more than one, at the moment and most days it feels like 18.)
I’m grateful, but I’m far from comfortable because I know there are things I am here to do. Because I still have goals, dreams and I believe, talents to share. Instead, I find myself in my favorite, comfortable club chair most nights trying desperately to distract myself from grieving the time I’ve wasted! (If it seems counterproductive, it most certainly is!)
The following words from Beatrice, felt as if she was speaking directly to me:
“Now let me tell you about the thing that quietly steals a life without announcing itself. Not failure. Failure is loud and honest. Failure teaches you things comfort never will. The real thief is comfort. Comfort walks through your front door, sits in your favorite chair, and whispers, “Stay! It is warm here. You have enough. Why risk anything? And you believe it, because you do have enough. But enough is not what you came here for. I watch brilliant capable people, full of something real, slowly let that something go quiet. Not because life defeated them, but because comfort convinced them the fight was no longer necessary. They stopped trying then they started waiting and nothing came because nothing comes to people who are waiting inside comfort. Discomfort is not punishment. It is proof you are still moving. The easy path leads somewhere, just not anywhere worth going.”
I see the road ahead. I just need to get to stepping. I’ve done the research. Organized. Planned. Visualized. Written. Time to stop talking and start doing. But instead, I never feel like “it is ready to present.”
Beatrice continued, yet again, speaking to me directly:
“Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is a story fear tells to keep you exactly where you are. Nobody who ever did something meaningful felt ready. First, they moved, and the readiness came after. I spent my whole life waiting to feel ready. Ready to travel. Ready to write the book I always wanted to write. Ready to have the hard conversations. Ready to live the life I actually wanted, instead of the one I thought I was supposed to want. I never felt ready, so I never did most of it, and now I am out of time. You are not.”
The truth is, we don’t get multiple lives. We get one.
But we do get multiple versions of ourselves within this one life. Versions often shaped not only by what we’ve lost, but what we’ve gained. Versions that had to let go of one story to step into another.
So, if you find yourself mourning the life you didn’t live, the time you can’t get back, the person you used to be… you’re not alone. You’re standing in the space between an ending and a beginning.
And from here, whether you like it or not, another chapter of your story begins.
LEAP AND THE NET SHALL APPEAR.