Stages

Sometimes the jobs I've had have taken me to "big cities." Most of them I didn't care for. A few of them I liked. In particular, I enjoyed visiting Los Angeles, especially the coastal parts of LA like Santa Monica and Venice Beach and Redondo Beach. I enjoyed driving along the coast highway and visiting the old Spanish missions. But LA has changed a lot since those days, and I have a feeling that the door has closed on those kinds of adventures. I don't think I would enjoy them now. I think they would bring more trouble than pleasure.

But life comes in stages. The things you love now, you may find boring later in your life. So if you enjoy something now, then take it all in—enjoy it as much as you can. 

When we're young, we think we are going to live forever. We know better, but that's the way we feel. We see old people and can't imagine that once they were children; no, they've always been old. That's how I saw my grandparents when I was a youngster. They had always been old; they were born old and were never kids that grew up and witnessed the passage of years. Oh no, that was unimaginable. My grandfather had always worn a suit and tie with a vest and a brown fedora. He had never been a baby; he had never been young; he had always looked just as he looked to me at that time of my life. 

Each stage of my life seemed like it would last forever. I would always be a teenager; I would always be a twenty-something; I would always be a thirty-something. Sometimes I was foolish, but I didn't know I was foolish until years had passed. Intellectually, I knew that I would grow to a point that I might consider my "peak years" and then I would go downhill toward a different kind of childhood when once again I might need help and support from adults around me. That end was far away and out of my mind, but I knew it was waiting for me, as it waits for all of us.

I'm not at the end yet, but I'm close enough that I have no fear of it. I can see into its eyes, and I don't see the eyes of a tiger, but the eyes of a granddaughter I never had, the eyes of an angel that stood beside me when I was foolish. There were times I counted myself lucky when, instead, I should have thanked that angel.

I'll soon take a step into another stage of life. It feels familiar and it feels unfamiliar. I don't know when and where it will end. All I know is that life—existence—arrives in stages. Birth was not the first stage and death will not be the final stage. What came before is a mystery, and what comes after is a mystery. But I accept it. Acceptance brings peace. 

I wrote in a previous blog post that all my life I've felt like a train on a track, unable to change my destiny—my destination—by the smallest degree. I feel a wisdom greater than my own is in charge of my destiny. I don't know about that, it's just what I feel. Especially at night when I sit alone in the dark and think about my life and where I've been and where I might yet be. 

Stages. Is it just me, or does anyone else sometimes sit alone in the darkness and think back on the stages of their life and wonder what the next stage may bring? I think only those spirits who have seen many stages, many lifetimes, think such thoughts. As a wise woman once told me, "young spirits are too busy trying to get themselves out of jail." Life is a long journey: you get to be young and old and everything in between. And, just maybe, you get to do it over and over until you do it right.