Today is my 60th birthday. Hang on a second, I need a drink of water. Gulp. It's ok, really, friends older than myself (I've always been drawn to those a bit older than I am), have said the most loving and gracious things, like, "oh you ain't seen nothin' yet", or, "just you wait." Yea. Eternal wisdom right there, truth-tellers they are.
My body feels older and achier, slower and creakier, but in my mind, I am thirty, forty-something. Get me laughing too hard at something mildly inappropriate, and I revert to a 9-year old on the spot. 60? Really? Jeepers.
In sorting through some files a few weeks ago, I came across a document I created on January 1, 2012. I'd selected a Celtic cross design on a gold background to frame the layout (a shout-out to my Scottish/Irish heritage) and in bold, green, 'Papyrus' font, no less, I titled the document 'In My 50th Year'. Melodramatic much? Maybe just a skosh. On the page, I painstakingly noted 50 separate line-items that I would attempt to do the following with in my 50th year: arrange, nurture, manage and complete. I can only assume my intention was to create a similar, yet incrementally more demanding document each subsequent year.
I gently held this file-rumpled, faded document in my hands, read it through slowly and said to myself, out loud: "oh, sweetie".
Several years ago on her sitcom, Ellen Degeneres said this line: "I don't know nothin' about nothin". I swiped that line from her and have used it often. Looking at the 50 demands I placed on myself, it is clear to me today that I didn't know nothin' about nothin. My lack of knowledge, my lack of understanding, my lack of grace for myself is glaring. The hoped for results were not committed to paper, but I can tell you what they were as if I had written the list earlier today rather than 10 years ago. It is all so implicitly transactional: if I do this, then this will happen. If I change my life in this way, this will be the outcome. If I commit to this endeavor, this specific path will open. If I behave, adhere, submit, I will somehow find the elusive thing(s) that prompted me to write such an edict in the first place.
Reading this document ten years later, the poignant reality is that I have no idea where some of the people are that I pledged to connect or reconnect with, I can't remember if I went to that training I considered essential, I don't recall spending all those promised rigorous hours in the art studio or in the garden or at the piano. And my achy knees seem to tell me I did not, after all, keep up with that rigid exercise program I'd carved out for myself. I have clearly lived into the line from the Confession, where I admit that so much has been left undone.
Today, I consider the meandering path that's taken me from there to here, and I can see that despite a to-do-list that would shame the most energetic of go-getters, there's been some love, there's been some rebuilding, there's been some music, there's been some becoming. And here I am, finding myself still a hopeful girl, having been carried, held, whispered to and beckoned by God.
I see more clearly now at 60 what my 50 year-old eyes were blind to: transformation of the heart and soul is not something I create, it is something I create a space for. The work of transformation, is God's.
This morning, I read these words from a favorite poet, Jan Richardson: "Look how far we've come. Look how near we are." The words struck me as rich and plentiful, nourishing and enough. I will gladly trade 50 line items for these few words of gentle invitation, of sweet mystery, of tender trust that the story that God is telling, the story that inexplicably includes my life, is still being told, is still unfolding, and while it may be precious to try to skooch that along with Papyrus-font to-do lists, God is at work, in the seen and unseen, bringing about God's dream for us all.
