The Unpredictable

Well, it’s inevitable really: the new year arrives, and we look back remembering where we’ve been and then consider where we hope or dream of going on our inner and outer journeys in the next year. Sunday I went to a gathering where the speaker asked us to remember January 2010 and bring to mind all that we had thought lay ahead for us. As it had turned out, I’d had absolutely no idea how 2010 was going to unfold.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that in April 2010 my marriage to Jeff ended. Twelve days earlier I’d discovered some unpleasant and unexpected truths about my marriage- truths that made staying impossible. What followed were the painful legal negotiations, emotional turmoil, physical dislocation and all around chaos and agony of separation.

So, when the speaker on Sunday asked us to consider what we’d hoped for and envisioned for 2010 next to what had happened, I felt a little dizzy just thinking about it. Realizing I was holding my breath, I inhaled deeply and felt something I feel increasingly as I get older: humility. Not humiliation. Humility.

Humility is the awareness of the vastness of what we do not know, the smallness of our own lives in the context of the cosmos and, never-the-less, our desire to tend the one small life we have been given, to continue to have hopes and dreams alongside the growing awareness of how much we don’t control. It’s the unpredictability of the losses that keeps us close to the reality of our own limitations. We all know that we and everyone we love will die someday. We know illness and natural disaster and financial crisis can and will happen. But we can’t anticipate when they will happen, and it’s probably just as well.

I think about that last weekend I spent with Jeff at home in the country, blissfully ignorant of how my world was about to crumble. It was lovely. We went to a small village nearby and wandered through the shops enjoying the warm spring afternoon. We ate at a local cafe. I bought a straw hat with a broad rim and Jeff took my picture when I wasn’t looking (always the best way to take my picture.)

Years ago, when I shared the story of how my dear friend Catherine had had a brain aneurism burst while she was at my home, I often said, “That’s what it’s like: One minute everything is fine and the next minute nothing will ever be as it once was. None of us knows if we are sixty seconds away from a brain aneurism.”

The older I get the closer I can sit with this reality, and the more easily I can be with the humility that comes when once again, I am caught off guard by an unexpected change that brings to an end some aspect of the story I am living. I’m actually delighted to discover my capacity to at least partially forget previous pain. (In places with accessible birth control, would there be any second children without this ability?) When the truth about my marriage came out, as unexpected as it was, it was not an entirely new truth. That’s what made it imperative to leave: it was not an isolated incident but a ten year pattern I could no longer hold or ignore, a situation I could no longer stretch to encompass without doing real harm to myself.

And, the truth is, I’m glad to discover I hadn’t anticipated it. I was there fully until I left. Despite past difficulties, I hadn’t been scouring the horizon for trouble, waiting for disaster. Did this mean I felt blind-sided when the end came? Absolutely. But that’s okay, because the alternative- living in a state of hyper-vigilance, anticipating and looking for what can go badly- can suck the joy out of the moments we do have.

If there’s one thing I do want to keep with me as I leave 2010 behind, it’s the awareness that the joy we are offered today is all the sweeter because we do not know what will happen next. So, I’ll make my plans and set my intentions and dream for myself and the planet- knowing that the future is not predictable and largely out of my control- which means of course that the excruciatingly difficult and the magnificently marvellous can and will happen. We just don’t know when.

(Like right now: as I write this a group of five year olds in the playground beside my balcony are, despite the snow, singing "Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver, where still the might moose wanders at will. . . " They are accompanied by a young man- their daycare worker- playing a penny whistle. I can hear every word despite my windows and doors being closed against the winter wind, and when I go to the window to have a look, there they are- bundled in snowsuits and scarves, their heads tipped back, singing at the top of their lungs. Now that's magnificently marvellous!)