Your Story, Your Life #4


"Love is Short, Forgetting is Long" (Pablo Neruda)


It's been posited (though controversial) that every seven years our cells turn over and we are physically different people inhabiting different bodies. Since 2013, I've been exploring the flip, inner side of the coin, trying to figure out how much of me has actually changed, and what's stayed the same through the years.

Those of you exploring the spiritual journey of recalling decades of your life through writing, poetry, or other art may find it is getting difficult to quantify some lessons. Viewing our lives through the "retrospectoscope" means looking at events perhaps clouded by the residual matter of experiences and memories of other decades. Still, there's truth to be mined within each as they come to you. 

With that, I offer:

Actions Taken and Lessons Learned Ages Fifteen to Twenty

  1. If a person feels as if she has no future, one way to deal is to find another person to share their own uncertain future and attempt to create a lifelong partnership based only on determination and hope. You can be certain you love someone one day, and the next seriously doubt it.
  2. No matter how much grandma loves you, you can still try to grow up too quickly, and in the process think you are gaining control over your life even as you lose it.
  3. Not thinking about a possibility like getting pregnant is different from doing something to prevent it.
  4. You can be happy about a life-altering decision to have a child or be married, and also incredibly sad upon the realization that you – in your particular place and time- have no other risky, rich experiences to delve into by which you might test your mettle. Your focus cannot be wholly upon yourself once a child arrives.
  5. School, once gone as part of your life, might be something you actually miss once it is no longer a possibility for you.
  6. It's nice when friends visit, but as they talk about their teenage lives, you are thinking about paying rent, buying diapers, getting some decent furniture. Your thoughts are consumed by worries that you and your husband might lose your humble jobs as your visiting friends discuss what they are wearing to prom. Your high school friendships will never be the same.
  7. It is oh-so-very-easy to get into debt while young that takes YEARS to pay. It isn't worth it.
  8. Despite the hard lessons thus far, you can never, ever even begin to imagine life without your beloved child.
  9. If you think life with Mother was difficult, try Mother-in-Law.

I was beginning to get smarter, but ever so confused at this stage of life. I struggled with what I wanted to do, versus what I had to do. Without accessible role models for healthy marriage and motherhood, I walked the tightrope across one possibility to the next, not sure what kind of safety net I had – needing to take on faith that I had one at all. Often, I didn't.

The early years of my life could have culminated in multiple unrecoverable disasters. They did not. Fortunately, I had time ahead to live and to learn from my errors and missteps, and I'm grateful for the lessons.

But there were times in my first two decades of life that I look back upon with sorrow today.

Sometimes as I write of memories, a dull pain emerges as a reminder of the partially formed person I was – a youth, then young adult, who was raising herself, trying to create a life she never had. I'll get up discouraged from some writing sessions, exhausted and certain I will never write about anything again.

And yet, I do come back to the work of real writing that helps me grapple with life itself.  Through my art (such as it flows)  I'm able to process decades that have brought so many changes to my world, to our world. Reflecting, I find myself able to respect the harshness of life, while finding motivation to try daily to offer something, anything, to ease not only my heart, but the hearts and minds - or souls - of others, too. 

In that sense, the wholeness of a person really helps a suffering world. It's like a spiritual interpretation/adaptation of Heisenberg's theory of the Observer Effect, that just being in the world, as a whole self, makes life better all around. And as the poet Neruda has expressed it, though our time here, and so our love, is short, "forgetting is long." Something essential in us and around us is eternal - or so it appears to me.