Life Narrows

When we hit the ground running as a child, and we look around our world, the world is wide open. Every vista stretches for miles and miles in every single direction. There is nothing (that we see) that keeps us from doing whatever it is we want with our lives.

We start to grow up, go to school, discover our aptitudes and what we like to do. We realize that the math we need for one path isn’t our thing, or the grammar we need for one path isn’t our thing, and we choose another path. By the time we get out of high school or into college, we may have changed our path a dozen times, still seeing the world as wide open to us.

We start studying and/or working. We marry and have kids. We make decisions based on both what we feel is good/right and where we want to be. Well, some of us work our lives out that way. Others of us tend to just bob along with the currents. 

Even as an adult while making the choices of what’s for dinner, what movie to watch, what TV shows to get involved with, whether or not to continue/go back to college, little choices we make throughout our lives, sending us down one path or another, towards….towards what? That college degree? That career or job we love? Toward raising the children we love? Toward all those things that make up life. And we still have a fairly clear playing field with many options.

However, there comes a time when you look at your life and suddenly it seems you have ended up on a very narrow and restrictive road for a multiplicity of reasons: Finances narrow your life (or rather the lack of finances). Moving narrows your life in that people who move all the time cannot build up seniority in the career of their choice. Age narrows your life as your body refuses to do the things  you have loved doing, from walking a mile or two a day to roller skating at your grandson’s birthday party. 

I looked up recently and discovered that my life has narrowed beyond what I am comfortable with. I don’t know exactly how I ended up in this narrow place, but I have decided I don’t like it here and I want to broaden my horizons again.

Granted, I am not 21…I don’t have college and career and travel in my future. (Mostly I wish for travel at this point in my life). But neither do I need to stay inside much of the time and read books and just not be outside, in the grass and trees and blue skies. I am shriveling up inside from lack of nature, and my ability to get about in said nature and take photos and listen to the river and hear the wind in the trees and the birds sing. 

My resolution for 2018 is to go outside more, once the weather lightens up a touch. Take my camera and stay in the outdoors as much as I can with my physical limitations. Take my shoes and socks off and walk around the soft grass in the park “grounding” myself. Up to Mount Saint Michaels to hear the wind sing in the trees. Up to Canada for a day once I get my license enhanced. Broadening my horizons in 2018. May we all broaden our horizons in 2018.