There is a version of me on each side of this.
On one side: the woman I have been. The one defined by the labour and the children and the decades of building, the one who knew exactly what she was for and did it with a thoroughness that cost her and built her in equal measure. The one with the lanyard and the folders and the children at the table and the parents who needed her and the colleagues who relied on her and the students who would email a decade later to say she had changed something in them.
On the other side: I do not fully know yet.
That is the honest thing. I am standing in the threshold and the threshold is not comfortable. I have read the metaphors about thresholds and they tend toward the lyrical, toward the idea that standing between is a gift, that the not-knowing is itself a kind of freedom. And sometimes it is. Sometimes I stand in it and feel the openness of it, the genuine possibility of it, the sense that I am not behind or ahead but exactly where I am supposed to be in a life that is still underway.
But other days the threshold is just a hallway.
A place you stand in between rooms, not in either one, not settled, slightly cold, waiting for the next thing to clarify. Other days I want the other side to hurry up and show itself so I can stop hovering and begin.
I am trying to trust the hovering.
I am trying to take the advice I would give anyone else who was standing where I am standing, which is: you do not have to arrive today. The arriving is not the point. The point is the quality of attention you bring to the in-between, the willingness to not know for a while, to let the next version of yourself develop at the pace she needs rather than the pace you are demanding of her.
She is coming. I can feel her at the edges of things.
She is quieter than I expected. She is less interested in being right. She is more interested in the light on the water and the long walk and the meal shared with someone she loves and the conversation that goes somewhere real. She is not in a hurry.
I am learning to keep up with her.
