 Leaps and Nets |
|
I'm just sitting here eating Skittles. The ones in the purple bag, of course. It's insanely sunny and 70 degrees outside. I can scarcely bear to be inside. Last night over steamed pork dumplings and miso soup and today over shrimp creole and cornbread with old friends, I talked and thought about how to really live life in the new year. One friend and I decided that our resolution is going to be to Fight the Good Fight. Whatever that means in whatever situation, we're just going to do it. Fight the good fight. Fight to figure out what we want and how we're going to get it. Fight to eschew dessert (sometimes). Fight to have jobs that matter to us. Fight to preserve friendships that enrich our lives and cast off those that just give us grief. Fight to think, hey. We survived turning thirty. Now we're about to turn thirty-one, and it feels like even more of a new start in a way than thirty did. Who knows why? But it does. Fight to realize that we survived our twenties and now is our chance to regroup, reconsider, redefine. One of my friends counsels college students all day long and is raising a two-year-old. One is working a job she despises and is trying to figure out what she can do to still pay her big city bills but be happier. One is plotting to leave his unfulfilling job and is writing TV treatments on the side. These are all people I've known for a really long time, and it's good to touch base with them on where our lives are at the end of this year when we all turned thirty. What do our jobs mean to us? Our relationships? Our homes? Our parents? Our parents are getting older. What in the hell are we doing? I am glad to have these friendships. I am rambling. I guess I just want to continue my resolutions from the past two years -- being brave and letting myself be happy -- and combine them into having faith. Not faith in God, necessarily, because God help me, I have tried with everything in me to believe and I can't, I just cannot, but faith in life and in myself. Faith in the idea that taking chances is what life is all about. Faith that it will work out if we really try. Faith in the concept, that most beautiful of concepts, as espoused by Maureen Johnson in her performance piece as well as Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, that concept of the leap of faith. That sometimes you just have to say to hell with it and do things that really scare you. Because you have to believe in that Zen saying ... Leap and the net will appear. I'm not so good at leaping without a net. I am a maniacal net imaginer when it comes to most things. I have to formulate it in my head and be sure even if only in my mind that it's there. But sometimes I think we can get tangled in these nets we create for ourselves and that they can keep us from keeping our resolutions such as being brave and letting ourselves be happy. Sometimes there is no net in life. Maybe there are never any nets at all. Or maybe we just have to accept that they are there in ways that we just can't conceive of yet. I read Grace's beautiful, incredible words that always touch me so deeply and I see that it's possible to live in a way that's scary but that is also freeing. It seems, if I may presume to interpret, that Grace certainly found the courage to leap without any net but her own hopes and belief in her strength and in the ultimate goodness of life. She set herself free to try to be who she really is at the essence of herself. And Jessie knows the Widget will eventually arrive. And Chiara is moving to New Zealand. And I think that is so wonderful. I guess I could make a list of tangible things to accomplish as my new year's resolutions, and I guess somewhere inside I have such a list. But the prevailing sentiment that I want to embrace most fully is to realize that part of being brave and part of being happy is just leaping and trusting that between my own strength and belief in life and in those I love and in myself that the net will appear. In what form, I do not know. Maybe it will be a net of friends who hold me up when I feel crazy. Or my sister who is always honest with me. Or my parents, who, bless them, seem to keep putting up with me no matter what. Maybe it will be that fragile but amazing net that comes with being in love. I am simultaneously terrified of life and fully convinced that life is and always will be beautiful if we're just brave enough to believe that it is and can be. Maybe everyone is. Maybe we can all come together at this time next year and look back on the leaps we've taken in 2006 ... how we've leapt and lived and loved and laughed and learned, come what may.  :::
About this time in ...
© Copyright 2005 elb |
|
