Two steps forward, three steps back

Coming home from my first trip as a single person, I was transformed. Enlightened. So amazing! Life is wonderful!

And then I was here. Cold, rainy days, and long, lonely nights in the bed I had always shared with my husband. Faced with the chores of disposing of the physical remnants of a 30 year relationship, getting a house ready for sale. A good day is a day when I don’t cry until the afternoon. I schedule appointments so I have a reason to get out of bed, because sometimes that’s the most difficult task of the day.

It makes me realize that I have been living in a protected bubble for many years. There may have been issues with children and family, but I alway had the solidity of my relationship with my husband to anchor me. But perhaps that was a delusion, a space where we thought that the inevitable turning of the wheel of life was somehow suspended.

These thoughts remind me of the poems I used to write and I go looking for the book. And somehow this is as relevant to me as when I wrote it, almost 40 years ago. The wheel turns.

How many times
Will I walk through the fire
Before I remember
That’s how I got burned?
How many times
will I ask the same question
Before someone tells me
There isn’t an answer?

But thoughts of the future just block out the sun.
Clouds do that well enough for me.

When will I think
of our good times together
Without feeling the sorrow
That yesterday left me?
When will I sleep
In peace and contentment
Without dreams to wake me
And make me remember?

But thoughts of the past
jut block out the sun.
Clouds do that well enough for me.

So I remind myself, I am choosing to live in the moment. And if that moment is sad, it is no less real, and no less worth living.