It's 1:57 AM and I'm wide awake drinking a Samuel Adams cherry wheat beer. Does this make me a lush? My brain and body have been reset to nighttime hours, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't a difficult thing for my nightowl predispositioned self. It's not that I hate early mornings per se, but I'm virtually non functional before 9 AM and damn it's only when work calls that I can snap myself awake enough to do what I need to do. The mother part of me worries about this however, because now that I have a school-aged child, shouldn't I be getting up and simmering her a hot breakfast in the frying pan at the crack of dawn? Of course, I'm now sitting in the very kitchen I grew up in, and it's easy to remember my grandmother cooking breakfast. She'd make buttermilk biscuits, sausage patties, scrambled eggs, gravy, grits, and sometimes we'd even have home-made jelly and fresh sliced homegrown tomatoes. I keep thinking I'll see her when I'm up late at night like this, which is practically every night now. Husband and child are asleep but I'm wide awake. Tomorrow night I'll be in the ER cruising the hallways, problem solving or creating comfort for sick people, and some not-so-sick people. I have a job that requires me to be wide awake, alert, ready-to-go at the first sign of a "code" coming in to a trauma room. I'm not a nurse though. My job is so unique. I feel so blessed to have it; to have somehow maneuvered my life to this point - albeit there have been some slippery slopes in the process of getting here.
Excuse me for a sec while I obliterate a mosquito. Die you son of a gun! One of the hazards of my new living quarters is the bugs & spiders. Yesterday we even had a frog hop through the back door. After several days of hard rain it was too soggy outside even for him!
Life is a journey isn't it? You think you have a passion, and then you find you're not so passionate anymore. You think you have a friend, and then you're not friends anymore. You think you have a home, but then you don't live there anymore. You think you have a plan, but things don't work out the way you thought. The best part is that somehow, sometimes, the things you create by stumbling along, keeping on, is the very thing that brings the delight and joy back onto your horizon. We don't always know what it is that we are put here to do. We don't know who we are supposed to be with, who we are supposed to work for, who we are supposed to help or ignore. But there is always choice. Free will. The ability to rework the puzzle so that it fits for the here and now. Have you ever noticed that most elderly folks are so damn wise. They've already made their mistakes, fallen off their own proverbial cliffs, sank and risen again. But when you're in the thick of life change, you cannot always see through the smoke filled lenses to the light on the other side. It's coming though.
Right now, I love my life. And somehow, even though I thought I had things figured out several years ago about what my life path would be, the best part of all was the not knowing. The very stressful hanging on for the ride, the uncertainty, and the way my soul is now wiser for the journey I've taken so far.
Moral of the story: when life is darkest, open your eyes the widest!
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