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My greatest accomplishment of the week was cleaning out the fridge

The best part about sporadic (if ever) blogging is that it attracts an audience of sporadic (maybe never) readers. So I can narrate my life without fear of being negatively critiqued by an audience. Narrating in my journal nets a certain type of writing that isn’t necessarily for public consumption – more due to banality than any sort of prurience, though I’m not sure this blog post will be any less banal.

Still, there is something true about my last post. Dated 2 years ago, and promising regular-ish updates for no other reason than to mark changes and time, that post was made after the first in a series of difficult realizations about the health of my family that have been ongoing ever since, and have required a good deal of growth and all of my available resources to adjust to. In the midst of all of this, plans have been made. Attempts to stay connected to life have been made. Little stabs at processing using the written word have been made. Disparate tendrils of my life have been pruned back significantly to focus energy on the tendrils that are…well, tenderest. With gentle plans of a better future warming us like a distant sun.

When I started to reclaim the yard and garden and house, I felt like I was on the precipice of something. I was, but it turned out to be another precipice of something else. And perhaps that is just the nature of life, but this next precipice feels at the same time a great deal more harrowing with the promise of being infinitely more rewarding in the end. I have already been given and have spent my generational wealth. Now is my time to protect and grow what remains to ensure the future of those who remain in my family. These are big choices I am making, but I am thrilled and elated to think where I may be a year from now. Where reclaiming the garden was limited in scope and vision, these changes are a black box in my life in which everything internal and external in my life will transform into something I can’t even conceive of right now. It is a form of anarchy to make big changes like this midway or further in life, and start completely over. And I need that. I desire it.

My approach to it has been measured, and almost frustratingly so. However, the cautious pace I have adopted has already proven to give me advantage. I have a plan in motion, and I anticipate that when everything comes together, we will enact the plan. We’ve already changed mid-stream once or twice, and the changes have been for the better, and the time has allowed me to broaden and expand my vision of what our lives will be like. And yet, I am still ready to be surprised by what actually happens.

It’s like having a perpetual birthday present in front of me with a big sign on it that says “wait until you are ready to open this.” And I know I know I know I’m not ready, but I really want to open that present. So I have bursts of getting ready, and bursts of being ok with taking my time…and that is pretty much my life of late. Bursts of being agonizingly frustrated with where I am now interspersed with bursts of that quiet knowing that I will get there when I am ready. Slow and steady wins the race.