AT A CROSSROADS

STANDING AT A CROSSROADS

It’s been an amazing year of ups and downs. I have arrived at this crossroads not by chance. Now, it is time to focus on where the road leads. There’s a great deal of fear and trepidation. There’s a sense of wonder and excitement, but above all of it, there is the overall sense that things must change in my life, someway, somehow, I have to not find myself, but create myself.

Here I am, nine and a half months into a year that in so very many ways seems like a blur. Every new beginning, it has been said, comes from some other beginning’s end. I suppose this is true. A chapter of my life closed in February when I left The Publishing Company. The paths I thought I would be taking turned out to be very different paths than my original expectations. I contemplated the field of mortuary science, I contemplated the filed of accountancy. Neither of these upon further examination really grasped me. Now I have a very good temporary position and I’m starting, after a month and a half to grasp it all a little more every single day. Still, it’s strange and I wake up every single day asking, “what the heck is my purpose in life? Is what I am going to do today going to really going to take me where I need to be?” I have to have faith and trust that somehow, some way, all things are working in accordance to plan. Do I have fears? Yes. Do I have faith and trust? Yes. Do I have a support system in place? Yes.

I am thirty-seven years old. I have a college degree. If you had asked me eighteen years ago what I ‘d be doing today, I’d have answered that I’d be teaching French and Music in a high school. That never happened. Still, the dream the desire to teach and help a person learn something that is going to help them is very real in my life. Yet, I ponder the path. I have friends who are teachers. They impress me so very much. I wonder what their lives must be like.

I suppose the important things to do as I stand at this important cross road in my life is to ask what I do and what I do well. To stop, to take stock of my life. The thing I enjoy more than anything is playing the piano. Am I a virtuoso? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Accompanying is something that I love to do more than anything. I live my dream each week when I sit at the piano or organ and accompany the congregation. It’s absolutely like living a dream. How I wish I had the time to devote to learning so much more about my favorite hobby.

I stand at a crossroads with my faith. I walk into the Catholic church each week and accompany the mass there, but if I’m being completely honest here, I’m not being ministered to there. In the last few years, my view and love of God have changed. There is validity in all our world religions. We need to just stop bitching among various groups and just focus on love. GOD IS LOVE. That’s the important thing. I’m somewhere between a Catholic, an Episcopalian and a Buddhist. I see the wisdom in all these faith traditions. I am a little bit lost in what I truly believe, but I know that God is Love, and that is what I hang my hat on.

Relationships. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that one day, when the time is right, that there will be a relationship for me again. It scares me. It excites me, and I hope one day it will come to fruition and will come one step further to completing me. There’s a lot of work I need to do on myself before I feel that I can be ready to accept the love being prepared for me. It may happen tomorrow, next month or somewhere completely out of the blue. But, when the time comes, I hope I will have the wisdom, strength and courage to take love by the hand and welcome it into my life.

Friendships, I believe, are the backbone of our human nature. I have a very wonderful group of people in my life for which the word “friend” is not used a. There are some altogether amazing people in my life. There’s not a single day which goes by in which I don’t in some way give gratitude to a higher power for these people with whom I am blessed to share life…the happy moments, the tense moments and the moments I in which. I pray that I never take this love for granted.

Here’s my confession: I’m standing in the midst of a crossroads. I love the people in my life. I need to work on reconciliation with some people in my life. Others , I must confess ,may simply need to be set free. All in all, I stand at this crossroads and dream, hope, pray and believe.