Rambling on about time, tenderness, and learning when to step back and breathe…

Life is changing. People are changing. I am changing. Some days everything seems to move in slow motion… others zoom by. I look up and another day is gone. Another week. Another month. Three-fourths of the year has slipped clean off the calendar, and I could have sworn we just finished saying, “Happy New Year.”

Most of the time, I feel lost, or at least two exits behind with no place to turn around. This week I watched Our Souls at Night, and mercy, it found a tender place in me. It made me wish a little and dream a little. To live out an ordinary day, then have someone beside me at night to talk it over with. Nothing grand. Just a warm body, a familiar voice, and somebody who understands that sometimes the smallest parts of a day are the ones most worth telling.

I miss that kind of closeness. Lately, my life feels crowded with decisions and endings, with fewer beginnings waiting politely at the door. Maybe that is simply how the journey goes. When we are young, life keeps handing us firsts. Later on, it starts asking us to make peace with lasts… and nobody bothers to include an instruction manual.

Now there is nobody left but me and my sister. How can that be? I am the oldest, the one who is supposed to have the answers tucked away somewhere between the good towels and the family recipes. But I do not have them. The truth, as best I have come to understand it, is that nobody does. Some folks just carry their confusion with better posture.

I still do not understand how we all came to be traveling in different directions, drifting farther apart as though distance was the natural price of growing older. It was not that way for me. I stayed close to my parents and grandparents until they were gone. Holidays were not the only days that counted. Ordinary Tuesdays counted, too.

We had lunch. We called to talk. We called just to say, “I love you.” I would open the mailbox and find a note, a card, or a package sent for no reason except that somebody had thought of me. I keep a box of those memories in my bedroom now. To anybody else, it may look like paper and ribbon. To me, it is treasure—the kind that cannot be appraised because its value is measured in voices I can no longer hear.

These days, the phone stays quiet. Nobody comes. The excuses arrive faithfully, even when the people do not… no time, too busy, soon. “Soon” is a slippery little word. It can stretch from Sunday afternoon to someday and someday has a bad habit of never showing up at all.

That is the sad truth of my life right now, and pretending otherwise will not sweeten it. I have reached the place where, if I do not step away and take a breath, I am afraid hurt will harden into resentment. I do not want to end up hating the very people I am supposed to love. But some days I feel as if I am dancing too close to the edge… smiling, keeping time, and hoping nobody notices how near my heel is to open air.

How did I get here? Probably the same way most of us do… one goodbye, one disappointment, one unreturned call at a time. But maybe getting here is not the same as being stuck here. Maybe the next right step is not to solve everybody or chase every fading connection. Maybe it is simply to stop, breathe, and move back from the edge long enough to hear my own heart again.

I do not have all the answers. I may never have them. But I know this much… a dance is not over just because the song changes. Sometimes you slow your steps. Sometimes you sit one out. Sometimes you take off your shoes, stand barefoot on solid ground, and thank the good Lord you still have enough music left in you to begin again…

Today I am dancing at the edge, about to step off into an abyss, one I am unsure of, one that carries fear and anxiety. I am stepping in Faith, holding on as tight as I can. I am scared, scared of the unknown ahead, of what it could mean, disappointed that there is no hand reaching out to catch me. But this I know… God has me… I am covered, and there is nothing to do but move forward and on… Wish at times I was not so good at dancing so close to the edge. My blessing, my gift…