Patchwork Lives

It occurred to me, with a dull ache in my chest, that many people live ramshackle, patchwork lives. It makes me sad, on retrospect, that most dreams peak around our tweens and early twenties and then are consecrated to an uneasy limbo that fades steadily, almost dependably, into oblivion. We live buoyed predominantly by our daily motions, movements carved out by the gales of fate and luck and increasingly, apathy, rather than by a firmly directed and knowing hand. We relinquish our dreams as surely as we relinquish our youth, hand-in-hand; In time we dream less, and accept more, until the final product is a potpourri of things sewn together and unfitting parts seamed into one dissastisfying whole.

Yes, I believe it is the hardest thing to be happy -- not singularly or periodically happy, but rather to possess a sustained contentment and enjoyment of life that comes from balance and purpose of being. At the end of the day, I envy those whose souls hold a rare tranquility -- an aura of peace and faith so achingly valuable in this precarious world. And though beaten down, as we all are, by the struggles of this world, whose eyes still carry the flicker of candid optimism most openly seen in the eyes of a child.

The stories we piece together day by day form a lifelong fabric - the screw-ups; the gaps; the stains - they nonetheless will comprise the shroud with which we will one day depart - our legacies, our singular marks which will someday join the ranks of anonymity in an increasingly cavernous past. Thinking about this transports me decades into the future, imagining the moment I will hold my life-fabric in my hand, stroke it and mull over all the scratches and perfect parts and mismatches -- will I bemoan any large gaff? Or will I be be satisfied overall with the work that will define me when my life has faded?

Being around older people in my volunteer work and reading novels from the perspective of people twice my age or more have made a certain curious thing possible for me. It is as if I can already know and feel how an old person might think, inducted into the sunset of the human experience. It is as if in my fledgling journey, flexing my supple wings, I already can imagine the finish line, folding my wings away for the last time and the thoughts that might be running through my mind then. Pondering over this has carved a precious dimension in my vision; as I prepare for flight I strive to understand the beginning and the middle through a consideration of the end.

I clutch the young, uncompleted cloth in my hands now; with today's hands I can strive to prevent tomorrow's tears.