Be Careful What You Ask For

Gifts can come in very unexpected (and uncomfortable) packages

I have written that I want to experience life fully, live it passionately, feel it all. 

It can hurt. And it can amaze and fill us with such wonder and joy. And it can hurt again. And again. 

Life is full of so much, both bitter and sweet. And it becomes so much more poignant as we continue on our aging journey.

We love. We lose. 

We laugh. We cry.

We are connected. We are deeply, achingly alone.

We live. We die.

It is all part of the package. I cannot have one half without the other. Indeed, the more painful parts help me to appreciate the joy. But to feel it all comes with a cost. Feeling the pain, the loss, the heartaches….not for the faint of heart. Feeling the joy, the love, the passion, the aching beauty of it all…also not for the faint of heart.

To be alive, fully, is to feel. It all. 

I have loved people, and I have lost many of them. I have loved animals, and they are also gone. All pieces of my heart torn out. I have loved and continue to love life, and it is temporary. I have felt the deep connection, passion, sheer abundance and elation. And I feel the aloneness, the emptiness, the sadness, the ache of loss, the inconsolable pain of deep grief. The ever increasing awareness of my own mortality and ending. 

It’s all part of the package. If I ask for life, I ask for it all. I invite it all in. 

And it can bring me joy, although this somehow doesn’t seem to linger quite as long as the grief does, at least for me. Maybe it’s part of being human, of the attachment that precedes grief. Of love we do not want to let go of. 

And yet, I am grateful. I would not want to give up the joy and aliveness, so I pay the price of loss and grief.

 I love roses. Roses have thorns. And sometimes they make us bleed. 

They tell us to be careful of what we ask for. True. But, if we don’t ask, we don’t receive any of it. And for me that would be too high a price to pay. Since I am still alive, I choose to experience it all. I signed up for this ride, so I will buckle up and try and enjoy it as much as I can, until it is time to stop. There is time enough to be dead and not feel when we are gone. But, for now, I will keep asking for life. Thorns and all.