This Is It

(Edited Repost)

When I still had my whole life ahead of me, I remember facing the future with a sense of expectation that one day I would wake up and find my life’s path all laid out for me in blueprint format.  (Yawn!  Sure, didn’t we all?)

Maybe I had been brainwashed by too many movies with happy endings, but I anticipated that when “my day” arrived I would be greeted each morning with a nice neat package of clearly defined – maybe even realistic – expectations.  I walked around for a good ten years wondering… “Will this be that day?”   Looking for that one magical moment in which everything would fall into place began to feel like looking for a unicorn – I might hear about it but no one I knew had ever really encountered it!

So, years later, when I was seated comfortably in a therapist’s office around age 30, I started to get the idea that maybe I was doing something wrong.  Turns out my perfectionistic vantage point was blinding me.  I was so busy anticipating some invisible “‘ever after” that I was missing the “here and now” completely.   I was “waiting for the world to change” as John Mayer sings so perfectly.  It wasn’t an easy pill to swallow to think that the change needed to be in my own mindset.

So… this is it?!   What I make of each day is the goal, rather than a waiting room in which I’m biding time for fate?  DANG IT!

Now in my 40s, I’ve seen some pretty magical moments.  Not because they were dropped on my doorstep, but because I stopped looking “out there” and began to discover the fullness and beauty in things like looking into my children’s eyes and seeing joy.  And things like putting my head on my husband’s chest and thanking God that his big warm heart was beating loud and strong in my ear.

I’m happy.  Not because destiny has been thrust upon me… but because I stopped expecting to find it elsewhere.

So today, once again, I try to live in the moment… to live knowing that this is “it”!  It’s funny, too, how as I’ve start learning to look at today as “it” some of my other hopes have begun to take shape, too, just when I stopped worrying about all that.  Slowly…but surely.  So apparently destiny resides where our hearts find peace… not in the lack thereof.