March 26, 2008 @ 10:59 pm | Filed under: Uniquely Me

Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don’t see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.” -MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
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“No way. Well…whatdoya know?” Mike nudged me and pointed to the television. “Did you just hear that?”

I had heard it all right and - if I hadn’t been just absolutely shocked and thrilled to have my own feelings and thoughts validated by the current expert on Oprah - I would have been jumping up and down.

“It is imperative - in order for a woman to enter the afternoon of her life with grace and with joy - that she mark that milestone entrance in a way that is significant to HER.”

It was the fact that she used the term “afternoon” to describe the entrance into the midlife years that caught our attention and made us both smile.

For weeks I had been using this term myself to describe what I felt like the forties and fifties would be like for me. While many women seem to struggle somewhat with this number - and the ones beyond it - I think maybe I am embracing it.

I keep remembering those long late Spring afternoons when I was a little girl, right after the time would change. I would rush home from school, change into play clothes, and then head outdoors into the seemingly endless sunshine filled with equally endless possibilities.

Those afternoons would stretch on for hours and hours and were some of the most productive of my growing up years. Those afternoons were the ones where I played Nancy Drew to my friend Kathy’s Bess, I learned to hula hoop, skateboard, AND lemon twist. I hosted a free-of-charge gymnastics class for all the neighborhood little girls who were either younger than me or worse than me at flip flops and handstands. I would read in the treehouse and hopscotch on the sidewalk.

By the time dusk finally came calling - my tired little body was well spent but blissfully fullfilled and happy. I had given those hours my all; had milked them for everything they were worth. In those days there was nothing I felt I could not do. I embraced life with open arms and a joyous heart, reveling in the simple beauties of life.

That’s the closest I can come to describing the way I view my life right now. Once again my arms are open and my heart is joyous. It truly is the simple beauties that fill me with delight and that motivate me to ‘be all that I can be.’ I am doing my best to give this time in my life my all.

I have a feeling that my days of afternoon are going to be glorious ones. I feel my soul awakening to its full potential and to the endless sunshine of possibilities that are just waiting for me to find them.

The urgency I feel these days is an awareness that I’m no longer waiting for life to begin; I’m in the great big middle of it and I’m finding it to be the ride of my life. Is it always sunshine and flowers? The past months of occasional heartache are proof that Spring (even the Springs of the soul) have their share of rainy days and storm-filled skies.

I intend to milk this time in my life for all its worth. I want my soul to be blissfully fulfilled and happy long before the evening dusk finally comes to call on the afternoons of my life.

THIS…is living.