Tomorrow I turn 4-0. The dash is the life experience. Forty is a real grown-up, with life behind and choices ahead. I look around inside myself and find old pots and pans rusting, cobwebs dimming the light - junk everywhere. I have collected much over these four decades. Other people’s emotions and dreams fill wardrobes with showy gowns and taut suits. A bar table sits full of empty bottles, long drained of the elixir, ‘pay no attention and keep going’. Absinthe has nothing on its effects. The floor is trodden and windows filthy. The air clogs my lungs. Loitering here feels like naked deep-sea diving. There is pressure in my ears, lungs, and it is hard to open my eyes. Light and warmth are far away.
This sounds dismal, but feels more like touring a hoarder’s garage. Neutral dismay instead of clutching panic. The need for a garage sale, not a fire. There is much to let go of.
When I was a child we spent much of our summers at a rickety camp on Maine’s West Pond. The camp was supposedly the first on the lake, and sat tucked in a cove directly across from where the sun fell every evening. On the corner of the drive was the garage, a stand alone building probably big enough for one vehicle. There were windows on three sides and doors that never opened. I used them as a backdrop for my headstand attempts, and backrests for my daisy necklace weaving sessions. When I grew tall enough to peer in the windows, nothing but bulky black shadows could be seen. From the outside it did not appear there was anywhere to stand, let alone walk amongst the contents, whatever they were. I never did learn what was in the garage, but certainly it contained the remains of many lives. My great-grandparents had purchased the camp in the 1920s. Sixty years was sitting in that garage.
I only have forty, and while I try to limit my associations to objects, the mental clutter was harder to part with. For some this may mean memories, and perhaps on October 8, 2056 when I ponder turning 80 it will - I hope it does. Instead, now it is alternate truths. Tried-on personas, projected lives, souvenirs of identity dress-up. The room has good bones, nice windows, a few great chairs. But I treated it as a garage-sale junkie would a storage shed. The fun was the hunt, not the owning. And so in went my Olympic equestrian, my President of the United States, my mother, my conservation hero, my island dweller, my author, my landscape designer, my farmer, my animal rescuer - you get the picture.
Perhaps everyone’s first 40 years go this way: a choose your own adventure path of fits and starts that make an afghan of every pattern all in one blanket. Subtly, my greatest wish has become to know the pattern within my DNA and to let the yarn flow only that way. To stop trying.
The only thing I can knit is a dishcloth. These nice squares tattle so, though. They are always the same number of stitches, but can range from 5 inches square to probably closer to eight. Tight little stitches indicate tension and loose ones inattention. When I learned to knit every stitch was so tight getting the next loop around was near impossible. I tried too hard, afraid of dropping stitches. So, too, in life. It seems all I could read of the pattern was the heading, which in bold letters proclaimed, “IMPORTANT.” Instead of adjusting the light so I could better read the rest of the pattern, I began searching for everything that would fulfill the directive to be IMPORTANT. At 40 I am, at least in my tiny puddle, important. The word president appears in my title. This is gratifying, but leaves a vacuum. A sneaking suspicion is creeping in. What if everyone’s pattern reads IMPORTANT at the top?
I laugh-cried today when I realized that rather than the new pair of breeches I just ordered or the new squash spiralizer waiting for me to cook/play with it, the best birthday gift is this day alone. I am reveling in the views of fall color, the crisp sky, the clean house, the lemon doTerra diffuser, the clean laundry, the chance to sit and bear witness inside my head.
Stuffing more in is next on the agenda - it always is, it seems. #doctorateinprogress But I approach the next decade as a purge, a feng shui clearing. More will come out than will go in. And through this I will be … me. Just as important as everyone else.
