Trying...Regardless

I will never be wise. Comfortable in my sixth decade, I admit this as easily as I announce the time, or tell my husband the temperature stated on my weather app.

I catch the gaze of a young mother as we both make our way into church on a late weekday morning, the air unusually cool and dry for a late Georgia summer day. She pushes a baby stroller with an infant and a toddler, her eyes full of knowing.

It is this moment I understand my perpetual state of searching. Not so long ago, when I pushed a similar stroller, and would see an older, wiser woman, I wondered what riches my brain would later house. I’ll have it figured out then. I laugh out loud.

If I should fret over my lack of knowing in my maturing age, I'm unsure. But today I decide to no longer worry. I embrace the wonder in the liminal space of questions. Another person’s answers may not be the same as mine, and that’s okay.

It all started, I believe, by a book catching me off guard fifteen or twenty years ago---Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. The title says it all—and I’ve chewed on it ever since. While many things are not good or just, they exist regardless of my efforts, and they belong in the world. The same world that houses fragrant honeysuckles, vibrant tangerine sunrises, majestic mountains, hosts misquotes and cluster bombs and power struggles and starvation.

So, I accept there is bad, and there is good. I read the news and with clarity see one person’s good could be someone else’s bad. While it would be easier to close my eyes, I continue to consume current events. And although it feels like one person can’t make a difference, I can try.

Abroad, there’s not much to offer except prayers and cash pledges but, I find options to do here. Assist the refugee, visit the prisoner, feed the homeless, offer a prayer service to an assisted living facility. Call a lonely person, make eye contact and smile with anyone offering service—at a grocery checkout, a food server, the woman taking my blood pressure at the doctor’s office.

While true wisdom may be a stretch for me, there are tidbits I’ve learned in my six decades that I wish my younger self had known:

• You can’t get it done if you don’t ever start.

• It’s better to observe and listen than offer advice especially if it’s not asked for.

• Judging other people is fruitless; we don’t know where they came from.

• That stupid thing you did? Forgetta about it. Everybody else has.

  
  

After daily Mass, the young mother is trying to soothe her baby. Her toddler daughter, grasping the handle on the stroller, patiently watches, waiting. The baby calms down, and all three open the church doors into the bright summer midday sun.

Me? I’m lighter. Trying not to concern myself over little things, but resting in the now. A tad calmer. Trusting. Both God, and to some extent, myself.