Who are you? asked the Caterpillar

“Alice replied, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’“

Do you know this quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? It’s a favorite of mine although I did not read it in Carroll’s book. I discovered these words when I was in my early 40s, reading Transitions by William Bridges. That book and this quote both relieved and delighted me. I read there that I was not some alien being experiencing my life in strange ways unknown to anyone else. I was, in fact, in transition, and transitions have a structure that is “normal,” can be described and named. All transitions have an ending, a fallow period, and a new beginning. Ahhh … I thought. A structure. Nice and neat. Except, as Bridges was quick to explain, it was not like hitting your head into a tree and saying “Oh, this is nothing much; I just hit my head into a tree. How lovely.” No. Transitions are complicated, can feel like painful struggles, and are frequently more like the labor of a birth.

Since that time of finding Bridge’s book, more than thirty years ago, I have come to ask, “When am I not in transition!” One period of change has seemed to follow the one before and then was followed by the next. My entire life has been an ebb and flow of transitions. A process, a journey. If there have been actual destinations in this journey, those have been the moments when I was paying attention, noticing, like the photographs that catch some moments out of time through decades of a life. Somewhere around three years old there I was, click, apparently quite enjoying my dress-up and rocking chair; and in my early twenties in the classroom teaching public school music, click, while also feeling a lot of loneliness personally since I knew how to do that very well; and being wildly, totally in love with my beautiful blonde babies in my thirties, click; a bit lost at forty, having been shocked to arrive at a place where I hadn’t expected to be traveling…albeit still enjoying dress-up, click; expressing my sense of freedom and my own single joy in a moment of my fifties, click; and being totally in love again in my sixties as I watched more deeply and saw life through the new eyes of the next generation, click …while at the same time I was gaining more a sense of my inner freedom and joy in my own living, learning to be “more myself than I have ever been”, as May Sarton describes in House by the Sea: A Journal.

This is it, then? This is life? A journey, not a destination? That is more than a glib saying? We are on a journey here? The destinations are those moments that matter because we take notice of them? Click goes the camera in our hands or the one in our minds, recording what we notice. And the more we notice the moments, the more they do seem to matter? Yes. Yes, and yes, and yes, and yes again. Yes to all of it. Like the beautiful destination I experienced this past week when our thirteen year old grandson spent a couple of daytimes with us. Because he had sprained his knee badly and couldn’t do his normal activities, we had these rare and glorious moments/destinations: laughing as he did a puzzle with his grandpa, and making him pancakes for a late breakfast, and even getting a short cuddle with him on the daybed, reminding each other of when we did that when he was a small boy. All beautiful stops/moments/destinations like a holiday to be remembered with the snapshots in my mind, as the journey of life goes on and on.

Another photo in my mind, not an actual existing photo, is of a Thanksgiving, almost twenty years ago. I am standing in the kitchen where my children, in their 20s with boyfriend, girlfriend and cousins, mostly taller than me, are getting ready to make recipes that I had picked out for sides to go with the dinner that we were having for all of us and some other guests. My husband was getting the necessary steps ready to fry our turkey, an event of the holiday that particular year. It was time for someone to go pick up my mother to come to our house. Looking around to see who could do it, I realized for the first time ever on any holiday, that I was available. I was the only one without a job to do at that exact time. In the snapshot in my mind, I am in the middle of the kitchen area, with the young people on one side of me at the counter and the stove, laughing and cooking, and my husband and other guests are outside, setting up the cooker for the turkey. I am alone in the space without a job to do in my home on Thanksgiving before the dinner. As I write, I can feel again, the immense sense of joy as I looked at the people I love in our home, and the freedom that flooded me. I could just walk out the door and go get my mother, free to leave and even be alone in the quiet of the car for a few minutes. I don’t have even a mind snapshot of that moment in the car, but I do imagine that I was smiling.

Did we do another Thanksgiving exactly like that one? No. People’s lives changed and moved on in different ways, and that was all good, too. Other small landings for short destinations in life, to be savored and appreciated.

Who are you? asked the Caterpillar. Now, what would you, reading here, answer to Alice’s caterpillar? Would you answer right this second? First thought. Who are you? No censor; just whatever comes. No judgement. Who are you? I answered my own question as I write, and at my first thought I saw the me of fifty in that photograph…even though it is currently five in the morning and I’ve been up writing for a couple of hours. That’s who I am, that Dale. But then all of the other photographs come rushing in, too. Oh…that’s who I am. All of me, all those parts that have lived my life so far. Wow. This is quite a ride we’re having along the way to and from our various destinations, all of those selves and this one who is writing here to you this early morning. And when I peek ahead, I am imagining more. I do not know what to expect from the Dale in five or ten years, but I do expect to keep moving forward to discover more of me on the way.

I hope this finds you well in your life as you are reading. I invite you to claim your current destination in this exact moment, and whatever it is, to appreciate the you who is in it … and then pay attention and respect as you move through the day, your day … and the very next transition of your life.

Blessings and love always…

Please share this post with friends:

Email

Print

Facebook

Google

Pinterest

Twitter

Linkedin