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In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m reading a book about coping with change in your life. This isn’t my first time through this book. It was very helpful after the death of my folks. But reading through it this time it has become far more personal. The deaths of my parents were, to a great extent, external changes. But now…now I’m having to change ME inside to move forward into the next part of my life.

In the book James Miller says the key word for the BEGINNING of a transition is “feeling.” Your main job was to let yourself feel whatever was churned up inside you. Those feelings were important, and without recognizing them your transition might end up just another place to get stuck in your life. As to the MIDDLE of your transition he says:
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The key word for this middle time is being — just being. Be in the emptiness, and let it become a temporary home, where you can make real the truth that the past is past. 

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38b425beff2fb0142d465d582a701ae5I’m having such a hard time with this part of my journey. I keep thinking of all the plans we made for after the kids were grown and Drollery was done with school. Plans that will never come to pass, all the getting to know each other again that has been snatched from us by life’s throwing those bloomin’ monkey wrenches into the works. And I’m having a hard time letting it all go. And that’s the loss I’m grieving through right now.
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You are being given a natural time-out. Poised between the past and the future, you’re in a position to assess where you’ve come from and where you’re headed.

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Did we make good choices the last 44 years? IS there time to rethink any of them and do things differently? Have the things that were important to us changed? I’m afraid the answer to those questions would be a mixed bag. But it’s a bag we’re in the process of opening.

It seems sort of silly to put this all on a blog, but I wonder how many other folks out there are going through these same kind of transitional woes. And maybe I just needed to hear myself articulate it all so I was clear about what is going on inside me and even between us. Who knows?

But that still leaves one important piece of the puzzle to be put in place. Before Drollery and I can sort this out good and proper, I think we both need to figure out just who we are as individuals post-child rearing, and what we’d like to see happen for ourselves. I think he and I are both a bit confused about that. Or maybe it’s just that we have never taken the time to ask ourselves those important questions. Perhaps it’s true what Henry David Thoreau said:
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

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Picture Credits:
Honor the space — www.leanor.dk
Little Girl — nomadicalsabbatical.com