Missing Goals & Learning Reverence

Occasionally my lack of achievements will make me feel heavy with age. This is odd, I know, because surely I should feel light - not weighed down, not yet pigeon-holed. Buoyant with possibility. Instead, I feel as if those missed goals have slipped through my fingers, solidified into the unchangeable, constantly moving sands of time, and now my feet - and soon my entire body - are buried beneath them. It's similar to the games of my childhood, when I'd allow one of my siblings to bury me entirely in sand; except the experience does not resonate with the same playful comfort of those memories. Sand is being poured by the invisible hand of time, and each grain represents some new inadequacy - some new regret. 

I imagine my life as relay race; each self-appointed marker is a place for me to pass the baton on to my future self; each time I reach yet another marker empty-handed, I am ensuring the failure of all those future selves. So I am old at twenty-two because all that I have not achieved is an indication of all that I will not achieve. I have dropped the baton; I have already lost the race. 

But then Emma Straub told me (okay, she wrote it in an article to all late bloomers ): "No one is timing you." So if my life is not a race - not with myself, not with anyone else - then what is it? It's definitely regulated by time; the existence, the passage of time is an inescapable reality. Surely it's not about crossing an invisible marker waving the baton of my achievements though, because there would only be more markers after that. I imagine the markers would stretch on into infinity, and that their realization would only ever be bittersweet. If I was to focus on the present only then my life would be reduced to moments of time and how I could make every moment mean something; not necessarily something huge but something to me. Eventually those moments will become the tapestry of memories with which I keep myself warm; with what do I want to weave those moments together?

Reverence. I would like reverence to be the unseen thread keeping me together.

I was driving the other day, and someone had a bumper sticker (why do people have bumper stickers?) which said: "Keep Christ in Christmas." Although Christmas is not an accurate representation of what Christianity is, reading it reminded me of my fourteen year old self. I was raised Christian, and I remember never writing "xmas" because I truly believed in what that bumper sticker said. My twenty-two year old self read it and almost immediately dismissed it, but my fourteen year old self resonated with the sentiment. For her, Christ was very real - a savior. I was humbled daily by the mercy and the grace that God had shown me; Christianity was the thread of reverence in my life.

That religion no longer resonates with me, but occasionally I'll get pangs for the reverence it instilled in me. Recently, reverence is found on my yoga mat. I'll be lying in Shavasana, every part of my body in perfect union with my breath, and peace will descend on me - with it humility, reverence. I am awed by the Universe, by my body, by the responsibility of being human.

It is enough to just walk into my yoga studio or a cathedral; part of me is immediately awakened to the presence of something larger than me. I feel both insignificant and significant, tempered always by reverence.

Goals are not inherently bad, of course, but believing that my significance is going to rest in the balance of achieving or not achieving them is absurd.  It makes my world so small; it makes everything all about me. If I am not worshiping my success then I am worshiping my failure. This is not how I want to live; it doesn't encourage me to look outside of myself; it does not inspire reverence.

So my hope for December is to have at least one humbling moment a day - not in a cathedral, not on my yoga mat but in the normal moments of my day. I want to recognize the slivers of reverence in my life, and I want to hold on to them.

Speaking of December, this will be my last post for the month. I know my posts have been sporadic for a while now; I hope to return to my regular schedule (Mon/Wed/Fri) in January. I leave for Hawaii on Saturday (yay!) and am hoping to disconnect from technology for the twelve days that I am away. I hope you all have a gorgeous month and holiday season; I look forward to all the conversations we will have in the New Year :) xoxo