“O life,” she said.
We’ve all said it, or thought it, or felt it.
It means, “O life, you’re so beautiful, you promise so much, and yet, you little traitor, you’ve let us down a bit now, you cad, you flit, you flipper flopper.”
The ancient turn, the classical about-face, the emotive “O,” the wistful, apostrophic, exclamatory sigh into the void — it gets precisely at the exacting ambiguity of life’s blissful-distrubatory.
I’m in the people business — the nonprofit kind. My young, optimistic staff and I people farm — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. We sow, irrigate, harvest, bundle, haul, barn, transport and distribute people — sometimes, mostly, kind of, always very gently. It’s good work — messy, fun, disappointing, fulfilling, exhausting.
Yesterday, I gave a talk to a room of biomes concerning the happy navigation of the various and sundry vicissitudes of the culture wars. This morning I set up a plan to pay for a disabled child’s therapy. Tomorrow I’ll work on the buildout of a new counseling center. Next week I’ll give a talk on mental illness and suicide.
It goes well. It doesn’t.
Yesterday a person I’ve been helping turned on me. Someone else I have high hopes for didn’t show. Another slept during one of my talks. Another seems to be on track to perpetually ignore reality.
Today, I am in need of some serious ice cream. It’s an “Oh life” kind of business. They come they go; they shrink they grow.
I think that for me, the hardest thing is how life — and choices — carry them away, like the bright orange and yellow fall leaves floating on an inclining mountain stream.
My particular brand of dysfunctional co-dependence needs people-permanence. I used to teach full-time — in the humanities — and I used to grieve like a doleful poet when my students graduated. My current role is better, they stay longer in a church, but not long enough.
And so it is, “O life!”
They ebb, they flow, they come, they go.
And yet, there isn’t an option; there isn’t any other kind of life, the kind without the “Hi,” the sigh and the “Goodbye.”
This life is the good life, but it’s the next one that will be more stable. Can’t wait!
“Hmm, nothing seems to be as constant as change.”
As part of my survival strategy, I’m beginning to make friends with that.
Thrive! 