If Not Now, When?

Dear Maria,

Too long, I know, but my lapse comes not by design but more from being unable see dots connecting much in any fashion of late. It seems a week at most, it feels a year at least. I’ve complained to other friends that I haven’t been able to focus on any kind of writing—some of the complaints lodged via longish emails, and there you go.

Perhaps I am waiting for the what-will-come-next answer as if there may be a singular notion to fill in the blank created by my retirement from teaching. No, no regrets there, but this second stage, as Richard Rohr would have it, certainly feels in some ways a betrayal to what has gone before, the schooling and working and sometimes both.

A betrayal, you ask? By contrast, I seem almost afloat—adrift? My father opts for the whatever to be meaningful. Now isn’t that thought freighted with expectation.

Of late, my mother and I are using as a guide the phrase “just living day to day”.  Not in the moment—not for me at least, seems too fleeting. And not in the resigned sense of Laforgue’s “What a day-to-day affair life is”.  More, a finding peace in each day, admittedly some more surprising than others.

While sharing coffee earlier this week with a friend with a few more years of experience and with many more demands upon her time and energy, we agreed that perhaps that pursuit-of -happiness notion was no gift, but a curse. Contentment was the word we found more suitable to our current view, to let what comes be so with as little sturm und drang as possible.  And then a laugh, good luck with that.

What to do when buffeted by sorrows and setbacks? We might cling to one another, or maybe find solace in work. Or perhaps be content, for today will give way to tomorrow without our saying so one way or the other.

I wish for you and your family, days rich in blessings. Sooner next time, I promise.

Yours, to be sure,

srk