Time Keeps on Slipping, Slipping, Slipping Into the Future

I have been spending a lot of time standing at the stove flipping crepes and standing at the island filling and rolling crepes over the last several days. It has given me plenty of time for that zoned-out, meandering, non-thinking kind of thinking that is too often missing in my life of appointments, facebook, trip-planning, and Shakespeare.

And what I find myself thinking about is the dichotomies – the length and yet the brevity of our whole lives and their stages, the richness and the poverty of what we do during our time here, the lessons we seem to learn about a year after we needed to know them the most.

My parents, who mean more to me than almost any people walking on this planet, have been married nearly fifty years. It is a long time, and it is nothing. It is cause for celebration and congratulation, but in the back of my mind it is cause for a kind of pre-grief, because I know in one way or another their marriage is much closer to the end than it is to the beginning.

My highest, most spiritual self wants not to mind that, but my little-girl self’s throat catches and eyes well up at every thought of it.  Huh-uh, I protest, let these good, good days go on and on. Let there not be sudden collapse or lingering decline or pain or diminishing faculties. No fair! Yes, I am so bold and foolish as to think even that sometimes.

And then I am sorry, yes, I am almost completely sorry for my whining, demanding-more-and-more wishes – almost completely sorry, but not quite mature and wise enough to never think that way again, I am pretty certain.

But with the wistfulness, I am grateful, oh-so-grateful, for the blessings in the now. I mean to absorb their full worth, even knowing that growing closer in the present means the separation will be all the more stark later.

“The pain then is part of the pleasure now. That’s the deal.” Joy Davidman in Shadowlands