I didn’t expect 40 to come with any fanfare or spiritual insight. The years go by, birthdays come and go, and though when we are young we expect every milestone to bring major change, as I lived through my 30’s, my expectations changed. But, this birthday brought with it an extraordinary realization, and I wanted to share it.
I have spent the better part of my life feeling a great deal of pressure to be something special. Something big time. I think this is a hold over from a few things - surviving sexual and physical abuse in childhood, abandonment issues, family history of alcoholism, and my sister’s suicide. I think these traumas added up to a sense that being alive at all meant I owed the Big Someone Out There something more. I felt that I had to justify the decision I thought some higher power had made to allow me to live. I was looking for ways to redeem my life, to make it up to someone by striving to be something extraordinary.
I think a goodly lot of my anxiety stems from this feeling that I must be more than I am, or else…or else ‘what’ I’ve never quite figured out. But each day that passed as an ordinary day left me feeling extremely wasteful, as though I’d failed someone somewhere by simply living without reaching for something more.
I’ve been meditating on what the gods want from me for half a year now. In part because I never get a clear sense of ‘who I belong to’ in a Blue Star or pagan sense. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I thought it was important to ask the question. The question was, essentially, “What do you want me to do with this life you’ve given me? How can I serve?”
I tossed around a lot of answers that seemed to come from childhood filters. There was a lot of self-abuse going on throughout this meditation. A lot of ‘who do you think you are’ voices entering the mix. I discarded them as they came, but not without pain. Not without a struggle. Layer by layer, messages I’d received in childhood and continue to receive today got stripped away until I was left with the only answer that seemed to come from a loving place, a gentle place…
You survived, and now you’re thriving and you think you need to do more? Be more? How about you be exactly who you are? How about you acknowledge how far you’ve come? How about you be here now and revel in that ordinary miracle?
Oh. Well. Really?
Really.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t aspire to greatness, but I recognize in myself a desire for a different kind of greatness now. I want to be great in the sense that I let life flow through me in love. I want to be great in the sense that I stop being afraid I’m not enough. I want to be great in my ability to see the beauty in life, to take note of it, and to let it be translated through me into something I can share. I want to be generous with my time and energy. I want to be braver. I want to be in each moment with my full attention.
Which puts the power squarely in my hands, in each moment, because there is no goal ‘out there’ or ’someday’ that matters as much as my focused attention in the immediate moment. There is nothing I want more than to be here now.
To some, this might be obvious, and I might have struggled half my life over something that other people take for granted, but I’m okay with being a late bloomer. 
I’m excited about what the next half of my life will bring now that I’ve finally been able to give myself permission to really live it. Really live.
