Tag: change

Feels Upswell

Maybe it has something to do with the Andrea Bocelli concert we went to last night.

Such a privilege and a joy to see a world-class talent performing live and in person in a venue with 17,000 other people.

Maybe it has something to do with the upcoming one year anniversary of this daily blog.

Will I end it or change direction? At the moment, I have no idea.

Maybe it has to do with friends visiting. They come from a life I have left behind. They remind me of who I am and where I come from. How I had to live to survive.

Seeing Andrea Bocelli in concert last night reminded me how much my life has changed. I doubt I would have taken the opportunity had it presented itself in Canada.

Joy is multiplied when it is shared. And I had no one back there to share with.

It is always a learning opportunity to experience yourself in unfamiliar surroundings.

In the Orlando KIA Center I watched a seasoned musical genius wring every possible emotion out of the musical scale. I realized I was definitely not living in my version of Kansas anymore.

I well remember the unsettling pattern from my travels. It is hard to feel fully settled or grounded in a foreign country. I imagine it must take years to achieve that feeling.

That may explain why I am having that feeling now. Settling in a foreign land and separating from that which was so familiar for so very long.

Personal growth is usually incremental. But like arriving at any desired goal, working at something for years can appear to result in “overnight success.”

There can be several peak moments and precipitous valleys to go through along the way. Then something you strove for – often for years – is reality.

And with that, your reality suddenly is other than it was. You have arrived. Somewhere else that is different than where you were. Someone new and slightly unfamiliar who is different than who you were before.

This changed reality can bring with it a host of changes both internal and external. It can trigger – I am learning – an unfamiliar rise in emotions. It is perhaps nature’s way of internal decluttering.

I always believed that only by bringing something to light, can we see and examine it for what it is. It is only then that we can shed it and move on. That we can grow.

That would appear to apply to life changes, too.

There are markers in everyone’s life. Graduation day. The wedding ceremony. The pregnancy discovery. The birth of your first child.

A friend who dies unexpectedly and way too soon. Then one parent dies. Then the other. A cancer diagnosis in you or a loved one. Monitoring wonky lab results as if someone’s life depends on it. Because it does.

These changes rise incrementally even as we live our lives guided mostly by habit and daily rituals until there is – as my daughter put it – an “incident.” A something either large or small that changes the trajectory of a life.

So maybe the feels I am feeling are a cumulation of small events that have built up day over day and month over month for a good many months now. It intrigues me and makes me curious about what is going on inside me.

Among those uncomfortable feels is a rising sense of passion and reengagement in life. Modest ambition. Energy to pursue it. A feeling of being grounded and settling into place. Finally.

A saying popular in the last century was that the greatest gift a parent could give a child was roots and wings. Roots to bind them to who they were and where they came from. Wings to let them dream and grow and pursue their dreams.

Perhaps fomenting underneath my current state of emotional discombobulation are a manifestation of those two conditions.

Maybe all the internal seeking and emotional work I have done for so long have finally landed me here.

Inhabiting my self at last and fully for the first time? We’ll see.

New Year, Old Me

Hope is a wondrous thing. I’d even go so far as to say it is lifesaving.

In the face of all challenges and heartbreak, hope can rise. Bidden sometimes. At other times, it just seems to pop up. The proverbial beacon of light and direction sitting off in the distance that appears to us, seemingly out of nowhere.

I sometimes wonder how often that very scenario played out for mariners of old. In the middle of being mercilessly tossed about on savage seas with death but a rogue wave away, off in the distance, the lookout spots a lighthouse.

Hope rises. Life continues. The sailors get to live another day.

As we mark this first day of a new year in our calendar, we are similarly touched by hope for the year to come. Hope for renewal. Hope for freedom from pain – emotional and/or physical. Hope for better news. Hope for sanity and peace of mind.

It is, of course, a false construct. Today is no different than yesterday in reality. We are not Cinderella who transforms into a princess and steps into a radically altered lifestyle. Of course, at her midnight, she reverted to her previous state. But altered.

The prince she had met and dazzled set out to find her again. That particular “New Year’s Eve” did not make the changes in her life that night. They foretold them.

Change happens like that for most of us, too. Whatever deficiencies we want to address in our life often have to be faced full-on in an instant. Then the slow process of change gets underway. The outcome we want may take weeks, months or years to accomplish. Then, one day, if we’re lucky and have worked hard enough, we are there.

I had this experience with both drinking and smoking. There was a time when I could not imagine my lifestyle would ever be other than what it was. I took some sense of satisfaction in cultivating the image of a hard-working, hard-living journalist for whom alcohol and nicotine were mandatory kit in the trade. An Ernest Hemingway-compatible type of broad.

Confirmation of a pregnancy stopped smoking in its tracks. I inherited my father’s Dutch will of iron. Ditching drink took a little longer. But with almost 24 years of sobriety behind me now, I can hardly remember how or why alcohol was ever part of my life at all.

Yet through it all, I am still me. For better or worse.

I have certainly changed from my younger self. But the essence of who I am is still there. I believe it is that way for most of us. Change does not always present with glaring neon signs in our day-to-day lives. I still have laundry to fold, beds to make, meals to make and dear friends to connect with. Life goes on.

This eventuality can be a hard learning during the egocentricity of youth phase. For some that phase lasts a lifetime. When I learned the phrase “hissy fit,” I recall how mortified and impressed I was by its’ resonance. “Boo.” “Hiss.” “I don’t wanna.” Ya. That sounded pretty similar to me having a temper tantrum.

I am beginning to find some solace in the immutable fact of my own humanity. That is allowing me to ease up on myself. The big ambitions I had for my life as a youth have been abandoned or pretty much dissipated.

And oddly, I find myself these days in the exact situation I always secretly craved. A happy home life. A wonderful and satisfying marriage to a man I think is the coolest dude on Planet Earth. I had similar feelings about my beloved Yorkie, Bailey. Not that I am drawing comparisons between the two, I only mean to say that when I love someone or something, I am all in.

So I did not create a long and unwieldy and unrealistic list of New Year’s resolutions meant to kick in today. There are a few things and unhelpful habits I want to discard. There are a few things I want to do more of. Others I want to do less of.

Like watching TV news as I said recently. That activity is like voluntarily setting yourself up to develop brain fungus. Ptooey. Don’t need it. Don’t want it.

I find myself drifting back to the homely arts and wishing to strengthen my connection to nature. I want to do more of nothing and less constant of the constant unending to-do lists and busywork. It is high time.

You see life goes on with or without us. That is a hard and fundamental learning we all must get eventually. In the face of that truism, we discover the parameters of own life and what we can realistically achieve for our own happiness and that of others around us.

Peggy Lee, the legendary lounge singer from the last century, sang a song called: “Is That All There Is?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no. Not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath,
I’ll be saying to myself … is that all there is?

https://genius.com/Peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics

I’m going to follow Peggy Lee’s advice. One day, you may discover all of your hopes and dreams and expectations may sit shattered on the sidewalk outside your house.

You may be left to wonder why you lived this life at all and what it was all about. That realization has finally hit me. I’m a grain of sand on a beach. A single star in the heavens.

No matter. I have friends and some family members who love me. I love them back. I plan to keep writing and, as Peggy advises, “hope to keep dancing and having a ball.”

Minus the booze, of course.

Auld Lang Syne

I finally caught up with an old friend last week after a number of false starts. Hung up with mixed feelings.

Full disclosure: I have been under an enormous strain these past few months for a number of reasons. I have lived with a PTSD diagnosis for a long time. Some of the strain in my life has been deeply triggering. I am trying to navigate and resolve those feelings. There doesn’t appear to be a quick fix.

Here’s how triggered PTSD manifests in me: I talk my fool head off and mostly about me. I can’t fully explain why I do that or what that feels like. It is as if I am fighting for my life. It feels like I MUST make my position and feelings known and clear to whoever I am talking to. I desperately seek validation and reassurance.

That is compounded as I am terrified of not being heard. I am terrified that some crisis will happen because I didn’t warn someone strongly enough about what I see is about to happen. Not that I have ultimately been listened to anyway. To the listener, of course, it comes off as self-absorbed poppycock.

The listener isn’t wrong. Especially when they have no idea of the strain you are under or have been out of your life for a while. Life intervenes. Stuff happens.

So it was an odd phone call where the dynamic quickly shifted from “girls catching up.” She transitioned into “counsellor” mode and I was relegated to being “the patient.” It felt icky.

No doubt it was discomfiting on her part to engage in a phone call you thought would be a cheer-filled catchup only to find you are faced by a barrage of well-worn, existential complaints. And not for the first time.

I have had to navigate this dichotomy my whole life. Raised without solid boundaries or a clear and solid sense of self, I have erred on the boundary crashing front in extremis. I have had to identify and learn for myself what most of my peers picked up just by living at home.

Nowhere has this been more troublesome than in intimate relationships. I used to have a no-fail relationship management strategy. Before things got too close and intimate, I’d blow the relationship up. I’d break it off or create an irresolvable situation. By so doing, I was able to keep the pain of self-disclosure and exposure at bay for years. Sure, it was lonely. but it worked.

So I am on the phone with this old friend and desperately hoping she can sense and hear my pain and I spew my inflamed and irritated feelings all over the conversation. In a healthy and reasonable response, she backs off, shuts down and changes gear.

I am no longer the “old friend.” I am the supplicant. A problem to be solved. An object of pity and sadness. The Margot that drives her crazy. I gotta tell ya, that summary sucks.

And yet I clearly see how we have evolved into this place. We have hardly talked but a few times to catch up in recent months (years?). She has walked with me through a dozen major and minor crises in my life (largely self-created) over several decades. Her comparatively stable upbringing is the calm and centering counterpoint to my chaotic upbringing.

But I am a peripheral friend. An artifact of our college days. Outside her core of sensible and compatible friends who are calm and centered like she is. She has been a good friend nonetheless but time is having its way with us.

No longer the easy and familiar camaraderie. No longer the unspoken understandings that write the shorthand of longtime familiarity. Not much idea either of what is going in each other or in our lives that makes conversation fluid and empathetic.

I’m not grieving exactly. Our friendship is not finished. I am having to adjust to how it has altered. And why it has altered. My self-absorption and rumination would be part of it. But also our lives have changed in ways neither of us can fully appreciate. How could we? We haven’t seen each other face-to-face for years.

The loci of her life and of mine have separately shifted to the point of being unrecognizable to each other. I have not visited or even seen the new house she and her husband moved in to over two years ago. Even members of a kaffeeklatsch are more intimate.

I love her dearly and have always been profoundly grateful to have her in my life. But there have been periods of strain between us (some longer than others). Sometimes I marveled that the friendship held up at all.

i’ve always harbored the nagging feeling of being on the rim of her life as something of an interesting oddity. But trusting she found me bright and engaging enough to make a continued friendship worthwhile.

We talked about the weirdness of our last phone call. She found it weird, too. She identified an old and objectionable pattern in me where negative emotions took me over and ruled the day. I will try not to make that mistake again.

She is to be forgiven for not wanting to tolerate how pain manifests in me as it can be contagious. And it’s pretty self-absorbed. She likely has no idea how humiliating and upsetting it is to know my childhood deficiencies still manifest inappropriately.

I was heartened a year or two ago when she sent me something of a personal manifesto in an email. She wrote about carving out her own space and reclaiming her soul after a life devoted to serving others. She wanted to figure out how she wants to be and what she wants to keep in her life moving forward. Right on, said I.

My old saw: nothing in life is constant but change. She is now a long-married, happily retired professional woman who gallivants about North America and the world in her retirement while she and her husband still can. I am happy for them. It is a well-deserved coda to a good woman’s life.

Our friendship will continue. Most probably not apace. I received no signals that I’ve been kicked to the proverbial curb (yet!) in her emotional and psychic sorting process. I will try to be more careful and considerate in times of personal stress and strain. She is quite right. She doesn’t need that in her life.

It is an old and valuable friendship that has been through many shared experiences and challenges. The friendship is still there and still valuable. It has simply changed. Which was inevitable and up to me to adjust to. I’m learning the adjustments just keep on coming as we spend more time on the planet. Such is life.

Love you, old friend.

Changing Direction

Change is the only constant in life, they say.

I both hate change and I don’t. Whatever change I am on the brink of causes me stress whether I expect the change to be positive and, obviously, when I anticipate the change will be negative.

I haven’t always been able to accurately call how a situation is going to work out or how I am going to feel about it. Not in the beginning anyway.

I have enthusiastically embarked on new jobs only to discover several weeks or months later that the work and the situation were not what I expected.

Maybe the work hours were too demanding and draining. My colleagues may have been less than I expected. Testier, maybe. Or uncooperative. Backstabbers.

Sometimes I felt I just didn’t fit the job or the job didn’t fit me. Those jobs obviously didn’t last all that long. Their choice by times, and at other times, mine.

The trouble is we cannot know what lies ahead of us. We make the best decisions we can based on what calls to us or what we are forced to choose. The former are the lucky ones. The ones who pursue a path in life just because it feels right. Not because Mommy or Daddy did it for a living or are telling you to do it.

You can burn a lot of daylight and productive years following someone else’s dictates and expectations. Many people feel they have no choice. Many people do it because they can’t conceive of other alternatives. Many can conceive of other alternatives but are too afraid to try.

The people who imagine a different future and don’t pursue it are the ones I feel most sorry for. It is like that old saying: a taste of honey is worse than never having tasted honey at all.

You cannot continually negate or ignore what is most important to your soul and realistically expect a good result. Yet many ignore the calling of their soul anyway. And many pay a very high price for doing so. The “go-along-to-get-along” crowd.

Believe me, the crowd doesn’t give a care. Your life is yours. Believe that. I fear many don’t. It is hard to establish a path, set goals and establish boundaries that will help you get there. There can be a lot of choppy water to get through.

I reflect on this as I have been reading book coaches websites. They know intimately (or at least claim to know) the excuses, the obstacles, the distractions, the temptations, the naysayers scripts (both external and internal) that prevent people from writing.

Book coaches have advice to defeat them all. They have it because they have heard every excuse imaginable.

There is no question that if you write your truth honestly the feeling it generates may be akin to taking off all your clothes and running down main street carrying a flaming torch above your head. Risky, chilly business.

I write what I know because of what I lived through and what I learned from it. Then I share what I experienced and learned with others. I may not be the choir director but my voice is as necessary as any other to add texture and complexity to the choir’s harmonies.

That is a massive change in direction for me. C’mon, I’m a Leo. We are astrologically ordained to be showy, flamboyant and annoying. But that tactic is no longer working for me. I don’t want to be the sharpest tool in the shed. I don’t want to lead the parade. I am happy to follow along in the flow of life and add my steps when and as I am able.

And that is what terrifies me most. Who am I if I am not always in charge? Who am I if I just let something slide? Who am I if I admit my limitations? Maybe just another struggling human being?

That may not be so bad. I have always sensed most people are more forgiving of me than I am of myself. Getting to a place of consistent self-forgiveness would be a nice change.

Maybe I’ll try that for a while and see how it works out. At least, it’s not a job I can be fired from or quit.

Turning Point

How I love early mornings. Around 6 AM is ideal. This sacred state can usually last up until somewhere close to 8 AM.

I love the birdsong behind our house. We have a scruffy patch of untouched forest where committees of birds consort every morning to plot and plant their day. Or so it seems.

Lately, a murder of crows has taken up residence in the remaining live oaks behind us. I don’t actually know how large a group of crows has to be to be a “murder” but there is a bunch.

Straight out of birdworld central casting, they caw incessantly. Sometimes in unison and at other times, a single crow with a particularly large and booming caw rings out over the others.

The crows occasionally fly away in unison on whatever mission they have decided is necessary. I am struck by how little I know about birds as I listen to them and watch their aeronautic displays. It piques my curiosity.

I love early morning when it is quiet and the only voice I have to listen to is the voice in my own head. Uninterrupted by abrasive external distractions, I can enjoy my own sense of peace and calm.

I hear garbage trucks way off in the distance. A small aircraft buzzes by overhead. There is traffic way, way off in the distance. Soon cars will start up around me as neighbors head off to their jobs. I am no longer part of that morning migration and I am so grateful that is so.

Yesterday, I wrote what was for me a fairly disturbing post about an art installation replicating our collective Sisyphean task of chasing money to sustain our lives with increasingly diminishing returns until we die. I used to be acutely aware that there was an inherently unbalanced tradeoff between time and money in my life and that of others.

When I had enough free time to pursue personal interests, I rarely had enough money to freely do so. When I was employed and earning money, the time I needed to pursue personal interests was eliminated. A devil’s bargain.

I am at a stage where I am resetting my goals. I am no longer convinced I will write the Great North American novel or bank countless millions with which to address the world’s ills. In truth, I never really had those goals but, at least when I was younger, they seemed attainable. Of course, almost everything seems possible when you are young.

I have come to one simple conclusion for my future direction. My life, my rules. I fervently pray (and hopefully believe) I will never have to work at a boring and unfulfilling job again. I grieve for the people that do. I grieve that I had to for so long.

I will no longer “dress to impress” anonymous others whom I hope may look kindly upon me and bestow some favor or another – financial or emotional.

I will no longer be silent or cagey in the face of outrageous circumstances. Strategic maybe, but not cagey. Life has taught me the truth of that you can attract more flies with honey than vinegar … if it is flies that you are out to attract, of course. And for the life of me, I can’t imagine why one would.

This is a time of transition in my life unlike so many other transitions that preceded it. Life used to feel like having a bolt of fabric from which you could endlessly pick patterns and play with design and create costumes ad infinitum. Now I know the bolt of cloth I was handed is not infinite. Going forward, I must pick and choose the patterns and designs much more carefully and wisely.

Even these thoughts about my future are just forming. So much that used to drive my ambition and thinking has ebbed away. I am not as angry or tortured as I once was. I am wiser. I have made immutable choices in career, children and partner which have created a clearly boundaried paddock within which I will live out the rest of my life. Best make it the best it can be for me and my loved ones.

Dangers abound on the road ahead [like they always did] but so does adventure. And learning. And friendship. Blessed friendship. There are so many people without whom I would not be here today.

It is the harvest time in my life. To reflect on where I’ve been more deeply than where I’m going. To appreciate what went right and forgive myself and others for what went wrong. And for the most part, most of it no longer matters.

In a hundred years, it will matter to no one, except in one way. The external dragons and internal demons I’ve slayed will be a lesser threat to my children and theirs and the children of my great grandchildren ad inifinitum. I hope.

Knowing this in my bones has, if for no other reason, made all of the struggle worthwhile.

Change Happens

Today I had the kind of day I recently wrote about. I wrote about the Chinese farmer whose stallion ran away. What his neighbors initially thought was very bad news, soon became good news in their eyes. The stallion eventually returned bringing several wild mares with him. The new mares substantially increased the farmer’s wealth.

That story contains a wise lesson about perspective as it demonstrates a back and forth that can happen between “bad news” and “good news.” Is it really one or the other? It depends.

So “bad news” happened to us today. We woke up this morning to the sound of bulldozers and brush being cut nearby. I unraveled inside. The lot beside the lot behind our house was being razed. We only recently bought this house based in large part on the “back forty” behind us which is full of trees and bushes. It is essentially a forest.

The prospect of seeing this forest disappear before we’d even had time to enjoy it caused my stomach to turn and my heart to drop into my stomach. The dream we had for our home and cozy, private surroundings was falling apart before my eyes.

I did what I usually do in a crisis. I went into crisis management mode. “What can I actually control in this situation?” The bush whacking was happening. The trees were coming down. Outside my control.

What was in my control was information gathering. Who was building? What are they building? What is the plan for the “natural forest” in our backyard? My mind was racing. Would it all be ravaged and cut down to make way for a bunch of new houses?

First, I called the county property assessment office. I found out who owned the lot. I researched the adjoining lots. Different owner. Still the distressing niggle: is there a development going in back there?

Then I called the president of our homeowners’ association. What does he know about what is being built there? How could he help? Could he help? Would he help? All big question marks.

I finally found the name of the new owners on the county property assessors website. But no phone number. No email address. Just a street address. About a fifteen minute drive away from here. I jumped in my car and fired up the GPS.

I turned off the main highway and down a twisty road. One more turn and I landed in what I thought was the address I was looking for. No number on the house though. I was initially wary of the dog on the front porch. That was until I saw him wagging his tail so hard I thought he would fall over.

Encouraged, I braved the porch. My hands and legs were promptly and enthusiastically licked nearly to death. By, I later learned, Groot the dog. A love hound if ever there was one.

The nanny who met me at the door confirmed that her employers were indeed the owners of the lot and they were planning to build a house behind our house. Sigh. I gave her my name and address and phone number and email address and what I hoped was a cheerful note to the impending house builders.

Back at home, I comforted myself I had done all I could do and learned all that could for the day. I resigned myself to the uncertainty and started licking my wounds, inspired by Groot.

A couple of hours later, our insipid front door bell rang. (I really must do something about that.) Acting on the note I had left with the nanny, the builder/homeowner came directly to see us at the end of his workday. The stallion brought several mares back with him.

A standup guy. Concerned about some of the same things we are, specifically, taking down trees. Losing the “natural” vibe. We talked mitigation strategies to make up for our compromised view. Vibernum vines. Night-blooming jasmine. He even wants to do extra planting before the building begins. To give it a head start.

We shot the breeze for awhile. Found out where he came from. What his wife does for a living. The names of their two kids. And, of course, I reported on my near-death licking experience with the dog I then learned was known as Groot. His owner grinned. “He’s full of love.”

Look, if I could, I would revert to what we had yesterday. An unfettered view of natural overgrowth and old oak trees. The endless peace and the quiet. But in a nod to the inevitability of change, our new neighbor made all the right and wise moves.

Showing up immediately as he did and being as concerned about as many things as we are went a long way to soothing our distress over the impaired view.

In only a few moments, it felt like a friendship and alliance was made. The day ended much happier than it began. With a minimum of hand-wringing and drama. If change is inevitable, today was a master class for me in how to handle it. I look forward to meeting the mares.

Build on, Macduff!

Step by Step by Step

Have you ever stopped to look back on your life and think about how many things you have done and been? The roles you have played? Does it strike you how all-consuming and exclusive some periods were for your time, energy, and attention? And then, one day – just like that – those times are left behind in the rearview mirror and are gone forever.

Think about heading for a high school diploma. Then maybe a university degree. What about certain trade certifications? You worked like crazy for weeks, months, and years. Then you get your reward: the paper, the job, the crop. Your life – and your role in it – changes again.

We don’t approach anything the same way twice. Immersed in the learnings and experiences of the day before, we approach each new day essentially as new people. Incremental changes maybe but change nonetheless.

Think of your first day at your first job. How exciting and scary and confusing it was. Compare that to the type of days you came to have ten or twenty years into your career when it had become pro forma. “Just another day at the office.” Even the second day at your first job was different from the first.

In relationships – if we’re lucky – we are constantly changing and growing. The best marriages come to mind when they are respectful and mutually beneficial loving partnerships. But every day, we become different people and so do our partners.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be a parent to adults. They don’t “need” me now. So I often find myself in deep conversations with myself about how to approach certain topics with them. I did not have that level of caution and awareness when they were children.

I have also thought back on myself as a university student. Nothing else mattered in the world except showing up for classes, reading the prescribed books, and doing whatever it took to ace those courses. Then, you graduate. And somehow that all magically disappears. Mind you, in the workplace, it often feels much like term papers when a draft article or speech is due.

I am an inconsistent cook but mostly love it. Without question, my most ambitious and complicated dishes have been tackled when I was in a partnered relationship with someone. There was more balance for me in the domestic arena.

I made homemade liverwurst once. I have made surprisingly good stuffed green peppers. I have made a Crosse & Blackwell-worthy apple chutney. But then life got busy, and bazinga, I am relying on cold sandwiches and hot soup as mealtime staples for weeks.

Fitness and exercise is another area where I – and I believe many others – blow hot and cold. I have been a full-out gym rat for some periods of my life. And then something happens. I stop going to the gym. Six months later, I am like some slug of a couch potato who never worked out a day in her life.

So I am wrestling with what’s up with all that. I am back into a renovator’s role to set up a “new to us” house. I am picking paint colors and flooring and imagining how rooms will look and function. It is not as all-encompassing as it was on my first few tries. That is something of a relief. Now I have a better idea of how it will play out. I have a better idea about what to expect.

I know more than when I first started doing the renovation and decorating thing decades ago. So the process goes a little faster and with a little more certainty. But is still a step-by-step process that can’t be rushed. The walls must be painted before the laminate is laid and the furniture is moved in and the housewarming invitations are sent out.

Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. We are meant to weave in and out of various passions or pursuits and roles in our lives. We are meant to get stronger at what we love and are good at. We finally arrive at a place when we recognize and know better what that is.

When we achieve what we need to learn or do or change at each of our life stages, we get some ephemeral internal message to move on. Not a bad system when you think of it. Step by step by step.