That weird place in between

It seems like things speed up just to slow down


I am an impatient person. I can be patient, but on the whole I do not like to wait. This brings me to these last three years - it has been a Cosmic and Karmic game of "hurry up and wait" in every area of life. It has been a long three years as well - can't find work to save my life, can't get people to sign up to my hula classes, can't seem to sell my books, my stories, articles, what have you. It seems as though every time we, even some folks with whom I keep close counsel with, want or desire something - namely something that will benefit our lives and the loves of our lives - there is something blocking it.

Of course, I have been told by numerous spiritualists that I am being attacked 'on the astral,' and there was one guy who is a good friend of my dad's who swore up and down that the reason I am "being persecuted" is because I have strayed from the 'rigors of the holy ghost,' and yet there are still more people who think that I am not trying hard enough or that I am trying too hard, those who feel like I am too qualified for some jobs and not qualified for others, and of course, there are those who do not hire me because (their words not mine) I am very intimidating on paper. ( OK- whatever...)

At the same time I cannot help also feeling like I am, you are, everyone is at that weird place I like to call 'in  between.'

In between what?...


Well, you know, just...in between...in between jobs, in between living situations, in between this and that. Just in between, in that weird place where we all find ourselves from time to time, that place where if we took a nap we would wake up hopeful that we were no longer in between anything.

In between is that place where all of us end up when we have lost all that we thought were the defining things in our lives. For me those things would be the gimundo golf course home that we ended up losing to the bank back in July of 2008, the other four of the five cars we owned outright, the golf cart, the friends, the life that we built. And here I sit, now, in this very moment, actually grateful that those things are no longer mine, so to speak. I mean, yes, in the back of my mind I will always think of that house as mine, those cars as mine, everything that I lost, mine.

There is also another part of me that tells me all the time that if I want to have those kinds of things again in my life, I have to let go of those things, yes, even the memories of them, because the memories are what are keeping me and you and everyone else who has gone through this sort of stuff in the 'in between.' And I am finding out just how bad it is to unwittingly want to stay in the 'in, between.'

Hanging  on to things just keeps them there and keeps us there, too


I will admit to being a person who hangs on to things for too damned long. I get it from my mother, and my little sister has that whole "hang on to it for sympathetic reasons" thing going on. I have lost so many things in these last three years that any more now losses do not affect me as badly as they might someone who has not yet learned the fine art of letting go. I know that if I do not release the pain from the loss of these things I will never  be ok. I  will never be completely ok with what lies ahead of me, and that is a way bigger loss that I  will have to face and I am pretty sure that it is sooner than later that it will happen.

It is like trying to keep the memory of people who have died when we were children alive the way that we think they would have wanted us to. We can't do that to them, because that keeps them bound to us here in this world and they have another life to move on to. This same thing can be said of the loss of things that we had and that we felt and still feel are ours. We cannot move ahead if we continue to hang on to what was.

The Adolescence of our middle age


Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there are a LOT of people who are my age, who have all the same facets of life that I have, who are just a short distance away from where I am right now - stuck, in between.
It seemed so dramatic, adolescence, with its mix of promise and peril, and right now, at this time in our lives (and thanks to social networking sites like Facebook we get to have those same feelings of misgiving, complete with high school friends and that one weird kid everyone used to either loathe or fear) we are sort of in that same predicament, where nothing seems permanent, and everything seems to be ten times bigger than it was back then, but actually is now.

Adolescence was a time when we were unsure of ourselves, of the things we thought we wanted, of who we really were, and now we are all feeling those same things, all over again, but this time, we are told that it counts, that the losses will affect us in profound and ugly ways, and like then, our parents are bailing us all out.

And it sucks...it really, really sucks - a whole lot.

Things that we all thought were permanent end up being something that we can only have in dreaming, and things that we want seem to be farther out of our reach than they really are. It sucked being a teenager when we were teens, but now that we are middle agers, it still sucks and the stakes are way higher.

However...

Human beings are prone to thinking in terms of losses. We like to hang on to them as though they are all we have, when really what we have from the losses is the pain and the memory that won't leave us be. Yet, the one thing that no one ever thinks about is that we learn, whether we want to or not, something from everything that has ever visited our lives, hurt us, is now gone and only a memory. If we bothered to learn from the things that hurt us, the next time we get hurt we will fare much better.

I liken this time in life for many of us as our second chance at adolescence because then, like now, we were so unsure of who we were, of what we were supposed to be doing at these times in our lives. Like then, now we are all in the midst of a confusion which permeates the thinking and makes us want to cry tears of bitter mourning. And we should, cry, that is, because it is the only thing that we can do anymore.

Sure, we can get angry, but it won't change anything and we will still have to suffer the losses. We can get mad all we want, but it won't change anything other than our state of physical and mental health. We can be hopeful that what we lost we can have back, but in reality and at the deepest core of us we know that what was won't ever be again, and a lot of us are sad because of it.

I say that we should all forget about the pain - three years is a long time to be in pain, don't you think? I don't want to die young , and most assuredly I don't want to suffer physically for what happens to be something that is only a vague memory. It is not the loss of the thing that we suffer as much as the memory of the pain and the shame and the guilt that we felt that haunts us. We have to let go of those things. They are not the only things that we have to hang on to. We forget that in all the losses we also gain things. We gain the ability to deal with adversity, and we learn to have patience when it seems that that which is large and looming will eat us.

It is not going to eat us, I promise.

If we do not learn, if we hang on to the memories that plague us and make us cry...


We end up sick, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, which leads to our being physically sick. I know this, because I live with a sick person who is sick because he cannot deal with all the losses and in the losses there is still that mixture of not being able to rebound to what was.

We are not meant to be back at square one, or five, or even ten, namely if those things that we lost no longer serve us well enough to make a difference, not only in our lives but those of others as well. If we live in yesterday, today is impossible to live through, and don't even start thinking about tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes for those who still live in the loss and the pain of yesterday. If you live there, this means that you are having a hard time coping with the loss of your things, and that you are not learning what you should.  Things are replaceable. Things can be had again. You cannot, though, go back to the last thing you knew as "being happy." It is better at this point in time to be at least minimally satisfied with being 'in between.' We struggle to keep the lifestyle we had, never minding that it is killing us from the soul, out. We are so hard headed about these things, and we would prefer that it not be brought back into knowing. Well, it's here, and y'all have got to face it. Sooner is always better than later, and right now, we are hinging on later, guys. Later is not a good time to do it. Right now, though, is.

We have to listen to the things that are not being said, because just as there is no music without the silence between the notes, there also is no learning from the losses that sit silently and still in the halls of our spirits. We cannot allow the past to be the thing that dictates what we have in the future. Sometimes we have to think that what lay waiting for us and ahead of us is way better than what it was that we lost. Sometimes we have to believe that everything, no matter how cliche' it may sound and may be, happens for a purpose and if we mess with the chain of events just enough, we find that we are pertinent in the grander scheme of things.

Sometimes, it is the beauty in the mess that we create that teaches us that we are not what we were, not who we were, not that person who once was the owner of that house, those cars, that life and that who we have become is a purer sense of who we really are. Everything comes to an end, but that is because we can have no new beginnings without the end of the old.

SO, in knowing this much, we must think, too, that this is our second chance at growing. We are getting a second chance at those years when it seemed that we had too many pimples, that the cute boy in school would never look twice at us, and that we would never make anything of our confusing and crazy lives. Losing everything does have its upside - you just have to look for it.

...Roxanne...