The Brighter Side of the Storm

I know I have caught myself saying this more than a few times over the years:

“How is it even possible for time to have moved by me so fast?”

More quickly than I could have ever imagined.

One day you are twenty-one without much thought about where life might eventually take you, and then suddenly you are standing in front of a mirror wondering how the years learned to move so quickly with what feels like very little input from you.

The truth is, life rarely unfolds into neat little packages the way we imagine it might. That is assuming we even take the time to imagine the future at all.

Life bends. Interrupts. Rearranges itself.

Some seasons arrive quietly and settle into place before we fully notice them. Others seem to arrive all at once, spinning through our days with the kind of force that makes it hard to recognize ourselves inside of them.

When I walked away from full-time work and into retirement, I began thinking more about how quickly life becomes a whirlwind. The speed of it all somehow made sense, but understanding the how of it felt different.

As dramatic as the word whirlwind sounds, most storms in life do not arrive with thunder. More often, they come disguised as ordinary things. A shift in rhythm. A season of uncertainty. The realization that parts of life we quietly counted on were never guaranteed to begin with.

Health. Energy. Time. Simplicity.

Funny how invisible these things can feel until they begin asking for more than our attention.

Now, I find myself returning to this thought more often than I once did. What choice do we really have except to keep meeting life where it stands?

I’d like to think I’m holding onto an optimism that doesn’t feel forced. It is not pretending things are easier than they are. It feels more like a quiet willingness to remain standing, keeping the conversation with life itself open.

I want to remain curious. Hopeful. I want to keep laughing on the days that feel heavy. I want to keep noticing the small things, even when larger things feel uncertain.

There is something I seem to understand more clearly these days.

Life never stops asking something of us.

Sometimes it asks for patience. Sometimes courage. Sometimes acceptance. Sometimes rest.

And perhaps most surprising of all, sometimes it asks us to trust that even in the middle of a whirlwind there is something steady waiting quietly underneath it all.

A good conversation. Morning light. A familiar walk. The comfort of ordinary things.

A reminder that joy rarely disappears altogether. More often, it simply changes shape for a while.

Maybe this is what resilience actually looks like.

Not conquering the impossible.  Just waking up and deciding, again and again, to remain on the brighter side of things. To keep showing up. To leave the door cracked open for wonder, even when uncertainty would prefer we close it.

Life does move fast. Faster than we imagine.

But perhaps growing older offers us a quieter understanding.

We don’t control the whirlwind.

We only choose how we stand inside of it.

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

-Mary Oliver

Talk soon…

G