Whenever I plan to do something that seems special, or I am looking forward to, I try to keep my expectations in check. I try not to get my hopes too high or expect too much. Then whatever comes I am usually pleased. Expectations are a funny thing. If we hold them too high they are hard to meet. I know that. So I tamper them. I do this now naturally.
Is it age? When I was younger I would have high expectations of an evening out, looking forward to it. Now I often look forward to an evening in, maybe a episode of All Creatures Great and Small or Sanditon. Something "pbs-eey" to comfort me. When I am going out I am happy to do it, but I have no high hopes like I carried as a young woman.
"Ahh," my Uncle Donald said, "life ebbs away at us." We were sitting in our side yard and he was about seventy and he told me this. He was visiting from New York or Florida, wherever he lived at the time. A short man in a hat and suit and shiny shoes, his everyday clothes. I was in my thirties and I knew he knew. Life carves a little something into our being, like the sea carves the rocks it beats against. At the time he told me this, I saw it as if life carved and chipped pieces of us away. But that is how thirty five would see it. Now I see that life ebbing away at us means too that life itself is shaping us, molding us into something new all the time.
Perhaps I don't feel the same excitement of a night out or a special event. I don't enter into it with the hope of a girl, but with the sense of a woman. But I take so much more joy in the everyday than that girl ever did. The sun filtering the morning light at 6 am, the eggs from the farm, the little piece of bark beside the pottery on the table. Life has ebbed away at me for sure, and in doing so it has sculpted me and shaped me. It has deepened me and I am grateful for that.
I take no umbrage at aging. It does what it does. Feeling a sense of love and satisfaction with the small beauties of an ordinary day is definitely compensation for the little pockets under my eyes, the grey hair, the deep lines, and even the complacency I have begun to feel as I have aged. I mean complacency is self acceptance I suppose, but in self acceptance there is also a tiny level of self satisfaction or smugness that I want to remain aware of. We are just blades of grass after all. I am just a blade of grass.
I know I am not wise. For wisdom does not judge herself so. I do think though in many ways I know more than I used to. I also know that the sea does not stop carving the rock. There is more to learn. So wisdom comes in the waiting, the watching, the listening. Wisdom might be in the waves themselves. Perhaps it comes and goes depending on the tide. You cannot trust it to always be there for you.
This morning I trust the light on the chair, the place in my heart that wants to work and do right by others. I trust the hollow in me that longs to be filled. I trust my faith and my heart that knows. And I trust that with age there will also be hope, joy and all the things I have always held. I know that just because I hold them differently, it does not mean that they are not still solidly in my grip.
