What I've learned in the last 90 days

To say the last Ninety days have been challenging would be an incredible understatement. There are days where I don't even know where to begin then there are days when I'm sure I've already begun and it's just a matter of catching up to myself.

I remember when I had my son twenty five years ago, you probably couldn't have found a more confused and desperately seeking something young woman in the whole state of California. Replace the young with accepting middle age and the California with Washington and I suppose that would be a pretty darned good picture of where I have been for the last three months.

I know a few things today that I didn't know last December, most importantly I know I am an awful lot more than my "job". Or maybe I finally figured out that "jobs" are really all they ever were. My mom has been telling me that for the last five years or so while I continued to obsessively lose myself in one piece of software or the next. Not out of character, it took me a half a decade to get it.

I've learned that people are afraid of change even when it is not their own.

I've come to understand that some changes skip a few chapters and find you with a life you'd never expected. I also understand that the person I was minutes before the pages flipped deserves a grieving period. I'm still trying to learn how to give that to her with a touch of grace.

I've found that working my muscles after years of not gives me great satisfaction. Today I lose myself in the art of strategically dumping the wheelbarrow instead of trying to find myself in the puzzle of someone else's problem. There is a simple closure there that is hugely important to me right now.

Today I almost accept that no matter how perfectly I plan, no matter how many times a day I crunch numbers the reality is it really could all fall apart any second of any day. Knowing that and continuing on is, in my opinion, the only thing that sets us apart from the animals that inspired this blog. Having the strength isn't really where I falter, it's the faith. It's getting there.

Again that brings me back to the animals. I look at them and somewhere in me I know this will all be fine. Somewhere in them there is a faith that keeps me hanging on. Pretty sure that sounds nutty because I am talking about a dog, a cat, and four horses saving my sanity :-) I suppose you'd have to take a ride in the car with Leo, rub Tex's teeth, help Patch find a private place to eat, kiss Katie on the nose, and have Amber lay her head on your shoulder to really understand. There is a level of trust and faith there that is, unfortunately, rare in the world we live in. I know today that I want that in my life always, selfishly, humanly because it allows me to have faith even in the face of what I know could happen in the blink of an eye.

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