I am going more slowly.
That is the first and most important thing. I am going more slowly and not apologizing for the pace, which is new, which is harder than it sounds for a woman who spent decades moving at the speed the institution required and before that the speed the children required and before that the speed of a young woman who had something to prove, who was always arriving slightly breathless, whose relationship with time was fundamentally anxious, always behind, always catching up, always not quite where she should be by now.
I am writing.
I am writing things that are not for a grade or a committee or a rubric or anyone’s approval. I am writing because the writing is how I think and how I grieve and how I make meaning out of the material of a life, and I have always known this and spent years treating the writing as the last thing on the list, the thing I would get to when everything else was done, which meant I almost never got to it because everything else was never done. Now the writing is the thing. Now I get up in the morning and I write before I do the things that need doing and the things that need doing are still there when I come back to them and they do not resent me for the delay.
I am learning to receive.
This is harder. I am better at giving, at being useful, at the careful competent management of what other people need. Receiving is a different skill and I was not taught it and I am learning it late, learning what it means to let someone cook for me without jumping up to help, to let someone say something kind without immediately deflecting it with self-deprecation, to let the care land rather than redirecting it.
I am choosing things I cannot justify on a curriculum vitae.
The long walk with no purpose. The novel. The afternoon at the sea. The dinner that took three hours because no one was rushing and the conversation kept going somewhere worth going and we let it. I am choosing these things and calling them important, calling them the point, calling them the life I am finally getting around to living inside of rather than managing from the outside.
This is what I am doing with the rest of it.
I am living it rather than preparing for it. I am finally, mostly, here.
