Beautifully written. You have read my mind, heart and soul. Passage of time : my babies are all adults now, my wrinkles, my daily aches, my mother’s hands and sad face, my mother having trouble recognizing her children, my father holding on to what was…all of these changes are hard , inevitable and part of life. I’ve learned that being present is the only way for me to slow down time enough to touch peace when it settles in me, to sit in my mud, to accept all my parts even the ugly ones, to let the tears flow easily , to hope for bubbles of laughter that let me know joy is good, joy is beautiful, joy is healthy and to accept the vulnerability of uncertainty. Who said life was easy? Thank you for your words and for trusting us with your both sides. Blessings 🙏
Thank you, Julie. For ALL of this. Accepting vulnerability, the tender parts of ourselves, the tears that insist on falling, makes life richer. At least that's been my experience. Sitting in the mud helps us shine. Life is just one big paradox parade!
Thanks for being here. Many blessings to you, too.
This writing is honest. And real...too real. I related to so many things. I actually used your writing to write something of my own to give to Joe. You helped me process some things. Thank you Allison for this!
That song! It broke me apart, ‘Both Sides Now,’ when I knew I had to leave my marriage, kayaking day after day in the Intracoastal Gulf waters, thinking, ‘“I don’t know love at all.” But in hindsight I see in fact I did: I knew how to love myself enough to leave. It took me such a long time to know that—that I had to leave—but if so focus on the time ‘lost,’ and not life and experience gained, I’ll sink rather than float to a richer understanding of the possibilities still ahead of me. Such a beautiful essay Allison. I am here for the discussion on time, all of it. 💗
Such a beautiful reflection, Amy! To love yourself enough to leave is the ultimate act of stepping into yourself. The love story we have with ourself is really the most remarkable of all, right?
“maybe that’s what midlife demands too: to look at yourself from both sides — the one who got you here, the one who carries past pains in a closed fist and the one who now feels ready, palm open.”
It’s such a beautiful image for this precise time/feeling in my life. Beautiful. Thank you for this lovely piece of writing and inspiration.
Yes!! To stay in that messy middle. This is the work, right? The allowance of the grey, the luminal space, knowing when we do shift from one side to the other, it's only temporary. As Buddhism teaches us, life is suffering. And this is actually a relief in so many ways. What a beautiful piece. Thank you, Allison!
Only temporary - that’s right. The relief of pain - relief of grief is actually a thing. I feel that Molly. Especially for those of us who numbed it all out for so long.
It was when I made the declaration that “time is my most valuable resource” that I started to sink deeper into debt. I started saying yes to everything with friends and family and no to work. As I now hyper-focus on pulling myself out of that financial hole, I feel like I lose my time, my most precious thing, to work. There’s always more money. There will never be enough time. I think this tug-of-war keeps me frozen, in a way. There is so much to say on the subject, and what you have written is beautiful. I’m curious to see where this conversation will take us. Maybe together we can find a way to slow time down to a crawl so we can fit everything into this one itty bitty piece of life that we get.
“There’s always more money. There will never be enough time.” That is it right there. As someone who easily can slip into workaholic territory, I need this reminder.
I think the two of us have unique “problems” in that our incomes fluctuate. I’m self employed and don’t have a known fixed salary. I imagine your income isn’t entirely predictable either - though you can anticipate the “high” season and the quiet ones. It makes us particularly vulnerable- especially given our propensity to worry 🫤
Debt is such a part of my story too. The tug of analogy is perfect.
I really look forward to untangling this more with you tomorrow Julie!
Gosh, I can SO relate to the list of things you count. I feel like I count literally everything. The only thing I stopped counting & recording in my daily journal is my number of sober days. I stopped in an effort to shift my focus from the neverending thoughts of alcohol/being sober to the joyful things in my life. But ironically, I look at the spot in my journal where I used to keep my day count every morning, so guess what... I'm still thinking about it daily. AND THEN my sober app decided to start sending me morning messages again, after being silent for months. What the heck?! So today is day 1091. Lol This part of your essay hit me hard - "Eventually, the glow fades. The routines settle in. The magic becomes maintenance. Suddenly, it isn’t an adventure anymore; it’s a commitment. You start noticing the cracks, the hard parts, the things you didn’t have to face when everything was new." Oof. Yes, that's exactly how I feel. Thank you for helping me find the right words. After retirement, I will have even more time to contemplate these things. One of my goals is to have something I read last week - "presence without pressure" (Lauren Fay). One more thing, I love the picture of you by the water, and thanks for sharing the songs. Have a great week!
“Presence without pressure" - yes yes. That is what I am in it for, too. I do believe all the contemplation, all the counting and maintenance we cling to *HAS* to happen first in order for us to stay awake. At some unrecognizable point, we slip into being fully awake without trying so hard.
Time's passage... I think about why, now at 63, everything is finally falling into place for me, then I smile. It falls when it falls. I remind myself that some people don't ever start this journey of exploration and discovery in this life. That's worth celebrating. Hopefully, I'll now have 25+ more years to exist in a more relaxed, peaceful state of mind. We are all shaped and formed by the intergenerational traumas passed onto us. It is only when we can name them, own how they have shaped who we became, and see them not as stumbling blocks, but as stepping stones, that we can choose a different path for the remainder of our time here. Over this past year, I have found myself, and she loves me so much. She was there all along, waiting for me to see her, embrace her, and know that she's always there for me. There is no longer a need to measure myself against any standards. I finally see all the ways in which I was separated from her, and how that made me be unable to see my beauty and inherent worth. I am home.
Janye! This is so beautiful, and it made me tear up. All of it, especially this - "Over this past year, I have found myself, and she loves me so much." I am pretty sure that is what is happening with me. I'm digging deep, hitting some hard stuff, and knowing that there is gold down there. We are the lucky ones - those of us who are curious enough to dig. It IS worth celebrating.
Ice cream castles in the air...I really enjoyed this post. I'm in a "pink" place & just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Intent on not wishing my days away, it's impossible to know the next step.
The pink can carry you for a while, T. Let it. And when it slowly fades, you'll have time under you and that's when you reach out for others to witness the hard. It's the only way. It is hard to trust the process when it is full of uncertainty. xoxoxo Glad you're here.
Such a delicate dance between light and dark. And this was such a good read, Allison—thank you for sharing what you're moving through so openly with us. I can relate to a lot of what you wrote here. I also had to listen to the Joni Mitchell song again because it had been so long, but it still hits (maybe even harder now?!).
Fabulous reflections Allison. I love that song and have played it several times in meetings. Being cracked open in ways that we aren’t expecting at moments we didn’t plan for, all this 💞
This was a comforting read Allison. I'm in the mud with you right now (aka midlife). This line resonates strongly 'You stop pleading for the dark clouds to pass and you ask them to stay until the lesson is over' ❤
Some lessons are long, eh? And some pass right through. I’m grateful to be awake to them all. And grateful to have folks like you who aren’t afraid to get muddy with me.
These are the lines that got me. It made me question whether I’ve spent most of my life trying to live within what my dad knew, and realizing that that is not my part of the race.
My part of the race is to live where he could not go.
I also realized, as I was tearing up, that my dad didn’t encourage me to go beyond him, and I spent much of my life looking for his affirmation that I was living where he was living.
But where he was living was pretty crappy and I don’t want to live there, and I want to encourage my own kids, my son‘s particularly, to go beyond where I will go.
I have been learning to slow down recently too and pay attention to the moment I’m in. I’ve spent so much of my life living into the future, and trying to refine myself without realizing that the refining comes if I engage with where I’m at.
Those dark clouds that we are so quick to want to get away from are the ones that bring the rain.
Benjamin - thank you so much for sharing these reflections. I have to just say, and I hope it’s ok that I do, that your willingness to be vulnerable like this (and like you have in conversations in the past) is so admirable. Most men I know won’t (or just can’t). I’m willing to bet your sons will take the baton you pass them and will continue a legacy of being thoughtful, engaging men who aren’t afraid to feel. Who aren’t afraid to run a race of their own.
“that is not my part of the race.
My part of the race is to live where he could not go.” Yes. I don’t know your dad but I believe you are.
There is another song by Katie Gavin called Inconsolable. It touches on similar themes with family of origin stuff. Powerful. I think you’d like that one, too.
I find it so remarkable how we carry the baton of parental approval and the ways they confine us well into adulthood.
I think, at our core, most of us want to be seen and known for who we are. But we don’t know how to be held.
We don’t know how to allow an embrace that we don’t feel worthy enough of. We feel like if we were really to be seen no one would even want to hold us.
I think we also struggle to trust that others have the capacity to really hold the fullness of who we are. It seems that it is in the practice of holding, however, that the capacity comes.
Yes, it is a practice. And in order to be held, we need to be willing to let others in, consistently and consciously. For many, it does not come naturally.
Honestly, sometimes I can’t even hold the fullness of who I am so how can I be comfortable with someone else holding all of me?
On reflection, I think the way that we can know how to be held is to practice holding ourselves, holding space for all of those things that feel like they are in opposition to each other, the ‘yes ands’. The practice of holding all of it and allowing it to be without the need to reconcile.
And holding ourselves can happen if we take time to slow down and be OK with being where we are, and stop striving to be somewhere else.
The striving to be somewhere else impedes all of it. You’re so right.
The words and work of Richard Rohr has impacted me the most when it comes to the paradox of being a human - the ‘yes ands’. I credit so much of my awakening to finding his message. It helped me find my own.
Beautifully written. You have read my mind, heart and soul. Passage of time : my babies are all adults now, my wrinkles, my daily aches, my mother’s hands and sad face, my mother having trouble recognizing her children, my father holding on to what was…all of these changes are hard , inevitable and part of life. I’ve learned that being present is the only way for me to slow down time enough to touch peace when it settles in me, to sit in my mud, to accept all my parts even the ugly ones, to let the tears flow easily , to hope for bubbles of laughter that let me know joy is good, joy is beautiful, joy is healthy and to accept the vulnerability of uncertainty. Who said life was easy? Thank you for your words and for trusting us with your both sides. Blessings 🙏
Thank you, Julie. For ALL of this. Accepting vulnerability, the tender parts of ourselves, the tears that insist on falling, makes life richer. At least that's been my experience. Sitting in the mud helps us shine. Life is just one big paradox parade!
Thanks for being here. Many blessings to you, too.
This writing is honest. And real...too real. I related to so many things. I actually used your writing to write something of my own to give to Joe. You helped me process some things. Thank you Allison for this!
Sha, you are doing the work with me girl. It's hard getting honest with ourselves. It forces us to say (write) the truth. I'm proud of us. xoxoxo
You are a poet and this post hit me like the songs you described. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Katie! 🙏🏼💛
That song! It broke me apart, ‘Both Sides Now,’ when I knew I had to leave my marriage, kayaking day after day in the Intracoastal Gulf waters, thinking, ‘“I don’t know love at all.” But in hindsight I see in fact I did: I knew how to love myself enough to leave. It took me such a long time to know that—that I had to leave—but if so focus on the time ‘lost,’ and not life and experience gained, I’ll sink rather than float to a richer understanding of the possibilities still ahead of me. Such a beautiful essay Allison. I am here for the discussion on time, all of it. 💗
Such a beautiful reflection, Amy! To love yourself enough to leave is the ultimate act of stepping into yourself. The love story we have with ourself is really the most remarkable of all, right?
Thanks for being here 💞
I love this line so much:
“maybe that’s what midlife demands too: to look at yourself from both sides — the one who got you here, the one who carries past pains in a closed fist and the one who now feels ready, palm open.”
It’s such a beautiful image for this precise time/feeling in my life. Beautiful. Thank you for this lovely piece of writing and inspiration.
Thank you, Kristin. The messy middle, that's what it feels like. A reclamation and an invitation. All rolled up in one.
Yes!! To stay in that messy middle. This is the work, right? The allowance of the grey, the luminal space, knowing when we do shift from one side to the other, it's only temporary. As Buddhism teaches us, life is suffering. And this is actually a relief in so many ways. What a beautiful piece. Thank you, Allison!
Only temporary - that’s right. The relief of pain - relief of grief is actually a thing. I feel that Molly. Especially for those of us who numbed it all out for so long.
Thanks for sharing here, Molly. 🙏🏼
It was when I made the declaration that “time is my most valuable resource” that I started to sink deeper into debt. I started saying yes to everything with friends and family and no to work. As I now hyper-focus on pulling myself out of that financial hole, I feel like I lose my time, my most precious thing, to work. There’s always more money. There will never be enough time. I think this tug-of-war keeps me frozen, in a way. There is so much to say on the subject, and what you have written is beautiful. I’m curious to see where this conversation will take us. Maybe together we can find a way to slow time down to a crawl so we can fit everything into this one itty bitty piece of life that we get.
“There’s always more money. There will never be enough time.” That is it right there. As someone who easily can slip into workaholic territory, I need this reminder.
I think the two of us have unique “problems” in that our incomes fluctuate. I’m self employed and don’t have a known fixed salary. I imagine your income isn’t entirely predictable either - though you can anticipate the “high” season and the quiet ones. It makes us particularly vulnerable- especially given our propensity to worry 🫤
Debt is such a part of my story too. The tug of analogy is perfect.
I really look forward to untangling this more with you tomorrow Julie!
Gosh, I can SO relate to the list of things you count. I feel like I count literally everything. The only thing I stopped counting & recording in my daily journal is my number of sober days. I stopped in an effort to shift my focus from the neverending thoughts of alcohol/being sober to the joyful things in my life. But ironically, I look at the spot in my journal where I used to keep my day count every morning, so guess what... I'm still thinking about it daily. AND THEN my sober app decided to start sending me morning messages again, after being silent for months. What the heck?! So today is day 1091. Lol This part of your essay hit me hard - "Eventually, the glow fades. The routines settle in. The magic becomes maintenance. Suddenly, it isn’t an adventure anymore; it’s a commitment. You start noticing the cracks, the hard parts, the things you didn’t have to face when everything was new." Oof. Yes, that's exactly how I feel. Thank you for helping me find the right words. After retirement, I will have even more time to contemplate these things. One of my goals is to have something I read last week - "presence without pressure" (Lauren Fay). One more thing, I love the picture of you by the water, and thanks for sharing the songs. Have a great week!
“Presence without pressure" - yes yes. That is what I am in it for, too. I do believe all the contemplation, all the counting and maintenance we cling to *HAS* to happen first in order for us to stay awake. At some unrecognizable point, we slip into being fully awake without trying so hard.
I wish this for both of us, my friend 🙏🏼💞
Time's passage... I think about why, now at 63, everything is finally falling into place for me, then I smile. It falls when it falls. I remind myself that some people don't ever start this journey of exploration and discovery in this life. That's worth celebrating. Hopefully, I'll now have 25+ more years to exist in a more relaxed, peaceful state of mind. We are all shaped and formed by the intergenerational traumas passed onto us. It is only when we can name them, own how they have shaped who we became, and see them not as stumbling blocks, but as stepping stones, that we can choose a different path for the remainder of our time here. Over this past year, I have found myself, and she loves me so much. She was there all along, waiting for me to see her, embrace her, and know that she's always there for me. There is no longer a need to measure myself against any standards. I finally see all the ways in which I was separated from her, and how that made me be unable to see my beauty and inherent worth. I am home.
Janye! This is so beautiful, and it made me tear up. All of it, especially this - "Over this past year, I have found myself, and she loves me so much." I am pretty sure that is what is happening with me. I'm digging deep, hitting some hard stuff, and knowing that there is gold down there. We are the lucky ones - those of us who are curious enough to dig. It IS worth celebrating.
Thank you for sharing here.
Ice cream castles in the air...I really enjoyed this post. I'm in a "pink" place & just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Intent on not wishing my days away, it's impossible to know the next step.
The pink can carry you for a while, T. Let it. And when it slowly fades, you'll have time under you and that's when you reach out for others to witness the hard. It's the only way. It is hard to trust the process when it is full of uncertainty. xoxoxo Glad you're here.
Such a delicate dance between light and dark. And this was such a good read, Allison—thank you for sharing what you're moving through so openly with us. I can relate to a lot of what you wrote here. I also had to listen to the Joni Mitchell song again because it had been so long, but it still hits (maybe even harder now?!).
Hits HARD now, right? In the painful yet necessary and good way. Joni is so masterful.
We may dance in the light and dark for infinity and maybe that's the point (?)
Thanks for being here xoxo
Fabulous reflections Allison. I love that song and have played it several times in meetings. Being cracked open in ways that we aren’t expecting at moments we didn’t plan for, all this 💞
The cracks are how the light gets in, right? Thanks for being here, Louise 🙏🏼
Such a beautiful share, Allison. This topic feels very, ahem, timely for me... in this first year of my fifties and coming up on six years sober ❤
Thanks Dana. Yeah, I keep waiting for this sticky, muddy, part of sobriety to loosen and it’s not. And that’s ok.
Midlife as a fully feeling awake human is hard work! 🤪
Grateful for your company. 💞
This was a comforting read Allison. I'm in the mud with you right now (aka midlife). This line resonates strongly 'You stop pleading for the dark clouds to pass and you ask them to stay until the lesson is over' ❤
Thanks Vicki 🙏🏼
Some lessons are long, eh? And some pass right through. I’m grateful to be awake to them all. And grateful to have folks like you who aren’t afraid to get muddy with me.
lol so painfully true, to cover things up with skillfully, managing myself or not so skillfully.
So much to comment on in this post
Well done.
Can we be truly sober from life?
☀️💖🤪
It’s true for all of us when we grow up we have to be our own mothers
Great post
Oh I convince myself it’s all skillfully. And all necessary lol. Until I call myself out on my own BS.
Life will give us plenty of material to continue “the work”. That is got sure. Self compassion is the ticket back home. I’m slowly learning this.
Thanks for being here, Prajna. 🙏🏼
“She’s coming round the corner
I can hear her yelling go
Go on girl.
It’s out of my hands
I can’t come where you’re going”
These are the lines that got me. It made me question whether I’ve spent most of my life trying to live within what my dad knew, and realizing that that is not my part of the race.
My part of the race is to live where he could not go.
I also realized, as I was tearing up, that my dad didn’t encourage me to go beyond him, and I spent much of my life looking for his affirmation that I was living where he was living.
But where he was living was pretty crappy and I don’t want to live there, and I want to encourage my own kids, my son‘s particularly, to go beyond where I will go.
I have been learning to slow down recently too and pay attention to the moment I’m in. I’ve spent so much of my life living into the future, and trying to refine myself without realizing that the refining comes if I engage with where I’m at.
Those dark clouds that we are so quick to want to get away from are the ones that bring the rain.
Benjamin - thank you so much for sharing these reflections. I have to just say, and I hope it’s ok that I do, that your willingness to be vulnerable like this (and like you have in conversations in the past) is so admirable. Most men I know won’t (or just can’t). I’m willing to bet your sons will take the baton you pass them and will continue a legacy of being thoughtful, engaging men who aren’t afraid to feel. Who aren’t afraid to run a race of their own.
“that is not my part of the race.
My part of the race is to live where he could not go.” Yes. I don’t know your dad but I believe you are.
There is another song by Katie Gavin called Inconsolable. It touches on similar themes with family of origin stuff. Powerful. I think you’d like that one, too.
I find it so remarkable how we carry the baton of parental approval and the ways they confine us well into adulthood.
“We don’t know how to be held”
I think, at our core, most of us want to be seen and known for who we are. But we don’t know how to be held.
We don’t know how to allow an embrace that we don’t feel worthy enough of. We feel like if we were really to be seen no one would even want to hold us.
I think we also struggle to trust that others have the capacity to really hold the fullness of who we are. It seems that it is in the practice of holding, however, that the capacity comes.
Yes, it is a practice. And in order to be held, we need to be willing to let others in, consistently and consciously. For many, it does not come naturally.
Honestly, sometimes I can’t even hold the fullness of who I am so how can I be comfortable with someone else holding all of me?
On reflection, I think the way that we can know how to be held is to practice holding ourselves, holding space for all of those things that feel like they are in opposition to each other, the ‘yes ands’. The practice of holding all of it and allowing it to be without the need to reconcile.
And holding ourselves can happen if we take time to slow down and be OK with being where we are, and stop striving to be somewhere else.
The striving to be somewhere else impedes all of it. You’re so right.
The words and work of Richard Rohr has impacted me the most when it comes to the paradox of being a human - the ‘yes ands’. I credit so much of my awakening to finding his message. It helped me find my own.