Patient Waiting – The Gift of the Unknown

Life is a mystery. A dash to a finish line that keeps moving and morphing and a path that changes from sand to gravel to treacherous rock. What are we to make of this crazy journey on planet earth, now that our days are fewer and we can no longer ignore the ending?

I’ve always had an uncanny ability to see too far into the future, both the good and the bad; the result of a hyper-tuned intuitive sense developed from a childhood of silence, I suppose. Sensing the possibilities in any given situation has been the magnet that has drawn me through life. It served me well when I listened to it. Not so much, when I didn’t.

Now, however, when the mystery of life beyond is the next great frontier, I find it more difficult to know what to do with this ability. I want to leap over the pain and fear of the unknown and slip back into the linear reality that would have us believe is dependable. Of course, we human beings are not yet in the business of defying death, no matter how hard we try, and so, this is never a serious option for me.

Life is less of a mystery, now that I’ve entered my sixth decade, but sixty years is not near enough time to figure it all out.  No, I think that it is the great beyond that is the all-consuming mystery to me now; that thing that at times is a dark foreboding and at others, the perfect peace. Whatever it is, it has become a constant reminder that this moment is all that matters, and the concerns of the superficial world are incredibly insignificant. Perhaps it is this awareness that creates the expression on so many elderly women’s faces, of quiet waiting and patient appreciation of the gift of now.

Dorothy Sander © 2013