Holding Pattern

At certain times of my life, I have felt like something was just around the corner. Like a big change was coming. Sort of like the atmosphere just before a thunderstorm breaks, when things are calm but there’s an electricity in the air.

I feel a bit like that now, except that I shouldn’t. I have, in fact, already had changes in my life recently, the largest being the loss of my aunt and my taking on my position on the Board of Education. Yet I still feel this sense of waiting.

Perhaps what I am waiting for is a feeling within myself that something profound has happened. For it all to sink in, as it were. There is a line from Glenn Frey’s song You Belong to the City that I always liked, “So much has happened, but nothing has changed.”

Because isn’t that how it often is? The minutia of life continues without heeding your internal changes, or the changes in your external life. When my best friend died, I so clearly remember feeling detached from everything, looking around me wondering how people could be going about their lives like nothing had happened. Marveling that the deepest shift in my life to that date left most of the world completely unmarked.

Now it’s the opposite. I am the one moving through my life as if nothing is different, yet things have changed. I suppose it is part of the process, of finding a new balance. I imagine I will look back in 6 months and see the changes clearly. But for now the changes are incremental, so I don’t see them. Like how you don’t notice how tall your kid has gotten until someone else says it, because you see them every day.

So even though I feel like I am in a holding pattern, things are shifting. It will be interesting to see where the changing course takes me.