so this is what my life is...

I've been meaning to ruminate on a most interesting notion that came up in conversation last month whilst out at a birthday dinner with Figgy's parents. I can't remember the specific topic we were discussing, but it was something about life, liberty and happiness and dreams and expectations and the changing face of all those things as you get older and you know, stuff and stuff.... and Figgy's mom, Sam, said "Oh yeah - I call it the 'So this is what my life is.' realization. She said they were sitting around one day and she just kinda realized that as a 30-something sitting with her husband and dog at home and who was in grad school and working on a myriad of other random projects that were in different phases of being done or not, she just kinda honed in on the fact that, well, she wasn't going to be the 'young genius' or the 'young prodigy' or that young person who excelled at and holy shit weren't they amazing and deserving of so much extraordinaryness! And having always felt like someone special and rather extraordinary, it was odd to realize that the idea of 'becoming something big' was not going to really happen in youth and that actually, the life that you are living is exactly what your life is. As in, “oh. So this is what my life is.” I've thought about this a lot since I first heard it and really like it for some reason. We all laughed about it at the time and over pomegranate margaritas it was certainly good conversation, but the more I've thought about it, the more it really sticks with me. I spend a lot of time telling people how happy and lucky I consider myself to be. And I do. And I am. But I think I have always lived a bit in the 'what will be' and 'what i will become' and 'what is still yet going to happen when the BIG thing happens'. In other words, living in sort of an amorphous reality that always has one foot in the present and one foot poking around in the 'what will be when i “grow up (and please god will someone tell me when that happens, because I don't think it ever truly does)”, “'make' it”, “figure out what I'm doing”, “learn all about ”, “get good enough at ”, “get good enough at in order to really try to ”, etc etc etc.' Well.

So. What touched me so much about this idea was the very simple core – that what you have/know/are/understand/do/see right now is exactly where you ARE right now and is exactly what life is and is exactly what your life is. Perhaps this is silly to some of you. Perhaps you've never had these thoughts. Perhaps you've already learned this. But, well, i confess that i did think for a VERY long time that there was some sort of special arwen life that I was going to fall into or was just going to happen to me and it was going to be so freaking extraordinary. Omigoodness, yes it was. Well, it didn't exactly turn out the way I expected. Had you shown me this mirror of myself at 32 way back at 13 or 18 or 22 or even 25, I would have been surprised. Because what I have figured out the longer I ruminate on Sam's amazing little words, is that holy shit... ok. The special arwen life door that i expected or dreamed of back then, did not open or fall upon me. But you know, the life that HAS been woven all these years to end up at this particular point in time turned out to indeed be special and extraordinary after all. Go figure. It just wasn't at all what i expected. Fame and fortune and genius it is not. But i expect that those things are WAY WAY overrated. My life is not. And this seems to be what it is.