a list, incomplete: this year (give or take), situated on the cusp of the next decade: i gave a clear presentation on a work topic, was asked and gave (hopefully) good relationship advice, planned a trip for a friend in celebration of marriage, welcomed younger co-workers to the firm, felt too old to dance the night away (handing the baton off to the younger folks in their 20s), welcomed an 8 year old into my home, felt too old to run after said 8 year old, felt a deeper sense of responsibility for my church family, noticed deeper wrinkles, advocated (successfully!) for asylum for an immigrant child from China (who calls me her sister), took on three more asylum cases, mediated weighty disputes, took measures to design my career, began chipping away at bitterness towards family, got things done on behalf of neighbors, saw more of my depravity, felt empowered, felt limited, became an advocate, became a mom, became my mom.
And enveloping this decade-shaped divide is a sense of peace (anchored down by the burden of responsibility); right before dan and i were married two years ago, i told him he felt like home; now spreading even more so is the sense that i am home.
when you are 30, the 23 year old you, the 17 year old you and the 6 year old you are all different from the you that is now (as will be the you that is 45, 62 and 89). you share memories and battle remnant insecurities, but those previous yous are now evaporating incarnations of former lives (sometimes leaving stains). objects you cling onto from those eras are relics that belong to another person (no longer you). this year i threw out two decades worth of clothing in a clothing swap, and in doing so, i said goodbye to limited too alice who discovered brands for the first time, taiwan dresses alice who wore heels everyday, hoarder-grandma fashionista alice who had a different ensemble everyday. (and for the time being i have settled into yoga pants and mono-colored dress alice who rebels with an inappropriate number of adult onesies.)
this year, i stopped by philadelphia, my home of younger days, for an afternoon and felt nostalgia tainted with the foreignness of a passerby time traveler.
at the start of the decade, an anti-confrontational baby adult alice living in philly wrote about yearnings to be bolder -- now it seems confrontation and boldness have become a bit of a reputation (perhaps to a fault, more or less). at the start of this year i was a decade younger. now, having brushed off the fairy dust, i settle onto something seemingly more solid.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and now, this too; a la my age (stage?) of too little patience, too much awkwardness, and too small a heart, a couple of c.s. lewis illustrations I identify with:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
alice the palace (in progress). unicef/ orphanage worker turned corporate tax lawyer.
"For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance."
alice the stubby-winged wife of dan the dino.
No comments:
Post a Comment