I lost a friend this week. A friend who died too young, but leaves a legacy of joie de vivre, and was a shining example of a life well lived…
It was brewing in my head, the deep and meaningful New Year’s Eve story. It was going to be called “Peace Of Mind”, and be about how we should all, in our (theoretically) universal desire for world peace, begin by finding peace within ourselves. I had a vision of the picture for the opening…a graceful luminara lantern, back-lit by a magnificent sunset, floating out over the water. What I wound up with was a little different, another chapter in the book of best-laid plans gone wrong. Luckily, I did not wind up in jail, and the resulting story goes like this…
I blink, and it happens. I find myself here yet again…another birthday. The end of a personal calendar year, the start of a new page, a new age. Time to take stock of where I am, where I have been, where I am going. A favorite saying comes to mind, “No matter where you go, there you are.” I am also fond of the saying (usually uttered in the context of a hike gone awry) “I am never lost…I always know where I am, I just may not know how I got here, or where I am going next.” These sayings seem to sum up my life, at least lately. The feeling that no matter how much I plan, no matter how organized I try to be, no matter what good intentions or illusion of control or imagined mastery of circumstances, I find myself in a place that was not on my planned itinerary, in a foreign land that does not appear on the map in hand…
Everyone wants to belong…to something, to someone. We go through life either trying to make connections, or trying to break the connections that bind us together. The journey to identity and self-awareness is different for each of us, and we don’t all find what we set out to seek. I wanted to know my ancestry, my heritage, my blood lines, and so, when I received a DNA testing kit for Christmas last year, I thought I was ready. What I discovered in the process is that spitting into a test tube and receiving a pie chart, superimposed over a map, is only going to tell a fragment of my story, and the true results I was looking for would not come via email, but in a very different kind of message…