You Learn By Surprises

You think you know how you're going to respond to things. Things like growing older, what it's going to be like. But you don't. You end up getting blindsided by your own reactions. In fact those reactions, feelings, responses are so surprising that you get defensive. You defend what you did or felt- even though somewhere down in the depths of the soul you know that something isn't right- and that something is probably within you.

That happened again a few months ago. I stepped around it and through it but those great psychological words- transference, counter-transference, etc.- described my reaction to things that I thought I knew how to handle.

Loss- the sense of it is a big emotion.

Grief- something I have never been good at; never have gotten used to it. It goes all the way back to 6th grade when I had my first awareness of mortality. We had been on a class trip to the circus that we had been working on for months. It was wonderful, exciting, lots of neat things- an adventure. But the next morning, a Saturday, I woke up and had a deep sense of sadness, loss. I would never have that experience again. It was great- but it was gone.

I didn't have a word for it, but looking back it was grief at growing older. Things happen- and things pass. "This, too, shall pass" had a strong negative feeling.

Or perhaps it went back two years earlier to my Dad's surgery for a brain tumor on my 10th birthday. That was 51 years ago tomorrow. The sense of aloneness and loss and fear were more than real. Fifty-one years.

Literally- a lifetime.

It is only natural, I am sure, to become more aware of grief and loss with the passage of years. More and more- people I have known have died. Last week a high school classmate died of cancer. Others have died in accidents, of AIDS, of war.

A lifetime.

But it is not morbid. It is what we begin to think about. Garrison Keillor is making a good living at being an old curmudgeon. I am just dealing with cleaning out closets and desks and boxes of pictures. Downsizing. Books that were important to me no longer hold on. I hold on to some simply because at one point in time (over a decade ago now with some; 40 years with others) they were life-changing books. They opened new worlds and new insights. They helped define who I was and who I was becoming. I hang on to them simply because they are there.

I guess this happens every year when the birthday comes around. Life moves on. Grief is real; loss is common. So deal with it.

Which is what I continue to do while also remembering to live and enjoy life. So I will go out on a bike ride after I finish this and by the time you read this later in the evening I will have finished band practice and getting ready to enjoy one more day of vacation on Tuesday.

A lifetime. Yep- and worth it!