Plan B

The conversations I've been having lately with people who are my contemporaries are interesting and new.  I know some really  cool people.  And we are in a stage in life when things are coming together and at the same time, are so NOT coming together.  There is distinct reckoning happening in most every single person's life that I know.  But the late twenties definitely seem to typify something specific about this.  I've been thinking about the concept of Plan B.  Culturally we know this is something that you begin to live or discuss or notice when the things that you thought were going to be just...aren't. 

There is definite sadness or grievance in some of this, but instead, or in addition to that, I am beginning to see layers and years and more of something else entirely.  Plan B is very very good.  It is, at this time, salted with experiences that had to be lived through and seen.  The weight of candor and conversation and what is in front of people is etching its way into life.  I find that I am enjoying this time of the great wide open unknown in front of me.  WAY more than the great wide open (whatever that means in the first place) being available right out of college. 




'Right out of college' can be a very scary time.  I learned a ton about myself in this period of life, but it wasn't very fun.  And I'm not sitting on my couch right now thinking about it in a nostalgic way.  It felt like a raw, refining time.  I often felt that I was hanging on to the side of a broken board in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck, saying to myself, 'I will find land.'  (Land in this case was 'a teaching job'.)  And I found land.  And I found a life that I like, no, love, and now the great wide open means something else to me entirely. 

More of this is really just that I'm comfortable with the unknown.  Mystery is so mysterious.  How does it come to us?  How do you explain the feeling of a mystery around you?  I have always been more comfortable with the abstract.  I know themes, ideas, generations, lifetimes.  But I also know, now that I am no longer such an obvious baby adult, what it takes to really get concrete and real and efficient in a daily schedule.  I can live in the clouds and still hold the line.  'Know thyself' or 'Salute thyself; see what they soul doth wear' is real to me.  I am living it.  I am seeing new things.  I am reckoning with old and new ideas.  Mystery and possibility and gray area are not so scary.  And there are good people in my world who are in these places and willing to be honest and true about whatever it is in their lives that provides mystery as well. 

A few years ago, I was very much aware of a theme that could be simply called 'bittersweet' in my life.  I felt the loss of my friend Kari keenly, and since then, have felt the loss of other things, previously solid.  And in another earlier space in time, I didn't know what to do with the sadness each and every day.  I had fears out of the blue that I had never conjured up in my mind before.  But all of the dark and scary things seemed possible like never before.  As a result, I prayed for peace like never before and sometimes I learned most from the moments of recognition about when and how it came to me.  But a few days ago I realized that something is being held differently there too.  Bittersweet is not a word that seems to have to match my heartbeat anymore.  

I feel relieved about this. 

Who knows what the word is now?  Maybe it's something charged and shimmering from Rilke.  Probably this would best encapsulate the current feeling.  A few weeks ago my friend at school talked about what can be good about the statement 'live the questions'.  Rilke said that a long time ago...a complex thing in an original way.  I like it lately because it has breathing room in it.  To me it does not mean a world lacking absolutes, but the generous winding approach that gets you to that very thing in the best possible way.   Rilke said something else well in a statement about seeing people in a good way, actually when discussing what he believes is the best kind of marriage.

'...a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.'

I know he meant it about marriage, but seeing things 'before an immense sky' is something speaking the language of these times, fraught with all of the life and change and questions people can muster.  Plan B IS being shown and lived out in front of me in front of an immense sky.  And it's actually becoming a very beautiful thing.