The middle

Today I moved a few blocks, from the Pearl to 23rd Avenue, from a building less than ten years old to a home more than a hundred years old. I helped an old friend pack, a task I shared with another of his friends who I've just connected with despite our common circles. I witnessed two friends' wills. All of these activities reminded me of where I've been and where I'm going. And I hoped, vainly as it turned out, that Martha Coakley would miraculously pull off a victory in Massachusetts and keep hope alive for healthcare reform, climate change legislation, and the rest of President Obama's agenda.

I'm thinking that we speak so often of beginnings and endings, but each of us has, in fact, only one of each: our birth and our death. Everything else is the middle, with all other milestones being arbitrary.

At Wordstock one year, John Irving commented that the hardest part about writing a novel is coming up with beginnings: for chapters, for paragraphs, for the book itself. Unlike novels, our lives have no chapters. We may see large Roman numerals along the path, but they're projections, and mostly seen in retrospect. In reality we live all our lives in the middle, and this eddy I've felt stuck in for awhile now is my own construction. I've remarked again and again that I feel "in between": in between being young and being old, in between careers, in between where I've been and where I'm going. I've created a trap for myself by thinking that I'm in some temporary middle and endlessly looking for a new beginning. I think now that there's no other beginning to come. What there are, however, are dawns and new days of living in this long middle that is my life.

And so today I inhabit a new home, and study for another exam, and eat another meal, and share another afternoon with friends, and worry over the news, and mourn for what was lost, and hope for what will come. All the steps along the path of a long life fall in the middle, with the only true beginning always farther in the past, and the ending always an unknowable number of steps ahead.

And from this perspective it's a little easier to accept that my life's path doesn't always go uphill or downhill or whichever way I think it's supposed to go. I don't always have the same things with me at every step of the way, nor do I share the path with the same travelers at every point. If I could stand again at other places in the middle, there would be unknown treasures still ahead. And from my vantage point here--knowing that some of those "future" treasures have come into and slipped through my hands--reminds me that I don't know what is yet ahead. More to gain, more to learn, more to lose, more to mourn.

It's all the middle until the end.