SavageTimes

There are days when I don’t want to get up, to face the reconstruction of my life that is in progress.  I want to stay in bed, where I can reminisce about what was, because good or bad, at least I know it.  What is ahead for me and my kids–I don’t know, and it’s nothing that any of us planned or ever even considered.

It’s not so much scary as it is just…unexpected. I don’t think we were wrong to have certain unspoken expectations.  Most of us do.  We go through our lives relying on certain situations and people around us.  We don’t ever really think how the landscape would look if those things were not part of it until one day, without warning, they aren’t anymore.

Then we are scarmbling: to figure out where those things went, maybe why those things went, did we miss the signs?  Did we hold on too tightly or not enough?

We own so much of our destiny in today’s world: we can often choose where we live, where we forge our adult education, who our sposues are, what to name our children.  We are aware of a bigger world out there, people making more money than we do, living lives full of adventure and laughter, smiling photos on Facebook taunt us, tease us into believing we could have “better.”  We can choose to go, to stay, to love or not love.  We can even choose to live or die.  We forget that, in most cases, the people that dot our landscape have the same choices.  They aren’t ours to own.  The people that are part of it have their own free will, their own ideas of how they should be living.

The unspoken expectations that the landscape will remain the same is, when it comes down to it, unreasonable.

When my son was little, he was fascinated by construction sites.  We could spend at least a couple of hours at a site bustling with backhoes and forklifts and cranes and construction workers.  Some of the sites started with the demolition of a building that was already there.  It never failed to fascinate me how an entire house could be reduced to splinters with the single, swift arc of a wrecking ball.

Life changes like that: with the utterance of a single sentence, oftentimes a single word reducing reality into splinters.

The rebuilding of a life requires tools, too: hope, strength, a little luck, courage to ask for help.  A lot of faith.

But that’s OK.  I liked watching the construction sites as much as my son did.

So I get out of bed every day, put my feet on the floor, go forward.  Chisel out progress.  What was is not necessarily better than what is or what might be.  It’s just different.  Life would be stagnant without demolition and construction.