#40 - 40 till 40
Confused about this post? Start with the intro - HERE
Note: I have written and re-written this post so many times I’ve lost count. There are so many different versions of this post and so many words I have added and deleted. What I'm left with is pretty close to the original post I wrote, which has a kind of poetry in and of itself. It may not capture everything exactly, but I find mostly that human words do not capture the depth and truth of my heart. So here it is without further ado, the 40th post in this project!
I am grateful for the opportunity to turn 40 and enter a new phase of my life.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I know many who have not made it this far into life. This always makes me acutely aware of my mortality and the gift that it is to live a life. It’s easy to brush these events off, bury them, and go about living your life, numbing out the painful parts. Sure sometimes I’ve done that, I’m human after all, but most times, after the grief shifts, it fuels me, and reminds me that I am alive and that is a gift.
I have always had that feeling like time is running out. Though that has shifted a bit now, the awareness of my mortality has always been a very present part of my life from a very young age. Mostly I’ve had a “why wait” mentality when it comes to a lot of parts of life. I did a lot of things “early.” I was the experimenter and the “go first” person in most of the groups I was a part of when I was younger. This also accounts for some of the reasoning behind a lot of my travel as well. Why wait? I never understood the wait until retirement structure. I’m not an impatient person, but I always felt like the “wait until retirement” was a lie society told us to keep us locked into a particular world view and paradigm. Yes, it’s good to save for a rainy day and all that, but to wait to have any sunny days at all? No thanks. I’ll take all my sunny days as they come. I don’t want to delay them. I want to live them. I want to be present in them.
The paradox of this is that I can be risk averse a lot of the time in certain situations, which you might not gleam from looking at my life from the outside. So these opportunities to live fully each day, to be present, and to take opportunities as they come helps me push the bounds of my otherwise risk averse side. It’s the opposition in my birth chart. Pisces has no bounds and Virgo has all the bounds. I am always holding seemingly contradictory thoughts and feelings at once. To me, that is life. We have to constantly do this in our daily lives. We know we are living and we know we are going to die. The gift and the curse of being a conscious being. Life is contradictory. It is often a paradox. This is duality.
We are here to learn how to hold both of these at once and create and experience the center point of the exquisite wholeness that is love. To be able to hold all the points, all the strands, and not make them good or bad, or judge them while feeling all our feelings, to hold it all with a loving tender care as we go deeper into the energy and essence of our heart nature and our connection to all things and beings. We are not separate from nature and each other, all the while each of us has separate experiences to guide us to wholeness within ourselves.
This is all to say, I am grateful for every year I have had so far, and every year I will have in this life. It’s not always easy, but it is truly amazing to be a human living a life on this planet. I am grateful for the opportunity to be here, to do my work in the world, be of service, to adventure, to be curious, and to love and be loved.
Closing Note: We made it 40 days with 40 posts! You have read just under 15,000 words throughout this project!
Thank you for reading along with this project and perhaps doing your own sadhana along side me. Your comments, emails, and messages about this project have meant a lot to me and I will cherish them as I move into this next phase of my life. Thank you for being here.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you!
