The front room is Firefly, the back is Rio Rancho. Most of what you see when you walk in is Sweet Vibrations…bright green. I can’t get these colors out of my head. I can’t stop imagining the next few days in fast forward…setting my lens on the workers while they finish tiling the walls, painting the trim and finishing the wood floors. The bathroom appliances are coming in and the furniture is arranged in each room to accommodate the space. Each piece of equipment is falling into place as we put curtains and blinds on the windows. The sound system and security system are being installed as we receive our small appliances, mops, brooms, soap dispensers. Then it comes…our first shipment of coffee. Then the real chaos begins.
I love rain…it comes to wash the world clean, it gives us a break from all the things we do outside and makes us stay in a little more. It calms my soul to hear it falling outside. And the slow rolling thunder reminds me that there is something so much bigger out there than I am. That I am not, in fact, in control.
The other night I was driving home in the rain and I pulled up to a stoplight next to a gas station. The fluorescent light shone through my window casting shadows of falling drops on my arm. I stared at the drops falling one by one down my arm and felt a sadness in my soul. As if those drops were the tears that I couldn’t cry. Not about anything in particular, maybe just the passing of time. I often mourn over time…it dies so quickly and I never appreciate it when its present. I mourn over the past…friendships that have faded because of marriage or location or just growing in different directions…things that have happened when I didn’t do anything or didn’t do enough or really went overboard…relationships that didn’t work out…or even just the good times that are irretrievable. I also mourn over the future, strange as it may be. That I know its going to look a lot like my past. That every decision I make is a hundred decisions I won’t make. Like reading a choose your own adventure and not reading all the endings. That I don’t know it and can’t control it, and the more people I love are the more people I will eventually lose. There is so much more pain left out there for me to feel and I have no idea how I will respond.
These times of introspection are good and sobering but heaven forbid I let them frighten me or subdue me. There is so much fear in life, worries that can stifle us. I choose to plow forward. I only have one life, my life. And if I am going to choose my own adventure I want to choose the one with the greatest danger, which is usually the one with the greatest reward. And take heart that I am not the one in control.
So I’ll spend the next few days watching things change, dreaming in full color, and moving right ahead. Knowing that things won’t happen just as I planned and I’m going to mess up big time along the way. There will be hurt and pain and sweat but I will be living life and not hiding in fear of it.
