There have been two times in my life when the transition from one age to the next has been challenging—mentally and emotionally. The transition from 56 to 57 has been one of those times. The other time was the transition from 34 to 35. I can’t tell you why these particular age transitions were difficult. They weren’t significant birthdays. I wasn’t transitioning from one decade to the next. Yet, these birthdays felt like thresholds somehow—that some significant change was stirring.
Blessing the in between
I was recently doing some housekeeping on my website and ran across this quote from John O’Donohue:
“… endings can be such a relief. When we suffer, we long for it to end. When we are in pain, time crawls. It also darkens and imprisons our imagination; consequently, we are unable to see beyond the suffering that plagues us. Often the greatest gift in such a situation is when someone manages to persuade the eyes of the heart to glimpse the vaguest brightening. Then the imagination takes hope from that, and constructs a path of light out of the darkness. Such endings offer great promise and bring us to the edge of new possibility. They are nascent beginnings. This is one of the fascinating characteristics of consciousness. Unlike the world of matter, in the world of spirit a whole territory that has lain fallow can become a fertile area of new potential and creativity. Time behaves differently in the domain of spirit.”
I believe that the words we need always find us when we most need them. I needed these words because this is where I find myself now.
Endings and beginnings
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about endings and beginnings. How something has to end for something new to begin, like the long dormant trees sprouting tender new leaves or the sunset that denotes the completion of another day.
Endings and beginnings mark the passages of our days, our years, our decades. In between the endings and beginnings lies the liminal space of I Don’t Know.
This is where I am right now.