How Old Are You?
Mercury in Retrograde + The Mystery of Age
Q: How Old Are You?
A: I’ve been sharing lately that I feel I am somewhere between 90 years old and 9 months of gestation. My body aches from the wrath of 2 weeks of schlepping boxes out of a home into a storage unit over to UPS and then up four flights of stairs. Somehow it isn’t over as I continue to decipher my future life and wade through belongings that have a semblance of meaning in all of this, I am just not sure what.
My mind is feeling new, lighter perhaps, but more as if I am swimming in an amniotic sack, and the only way I can communicate is by floating in jelly while wondering about the future. Some very significant changes have occurred in the past month and I am still processing it all without total clarity.
This moment feels a bit like a whiplash that needs time to heal through stillness. I’ve traveled through decades this month, traversed deep terrain of the past that was so heartbreaking and also heart-healing. I’ve released so much, yet I am still plentiful and have much more to give. I am grateful for all the blessings of this time of my life and also stunned by the formlessness of it all. If I ever was in transit, it is now.
Midlife Chrysalis
Old is such a strange word to always put inside the question, “how old are you?” We ask the elderly as well as toddlers the same question habitually. Sometimes people shift it up… ”how young are you?” but that almost sounds like a hallmark-esque cliché. What about “how do you find yourself in time?” Does that work? What would you propose?
Age is so mysterious. It definitely is a thing and now that I am in my midlife chrysalis of embodied change through and through, I can say I am more aware of it than before. Ultimately we are all like plants that require nourishment and water to hydrate and eventually wilt to return to the earth. Paradoxically, age is not mysterious but just what is.
For now, I remain in gestation…perhaps until next Spring. I’d like to seep into the fertile soil of my psyche and see what new plant can grow from all the inner work I’ve been ruminating on. Mercury in retrograde invites us into deep review. I think I will take the hint and go into a new observation of all I have seen, felt, communicated, and experienced during its shadow of recent weeks. Perhaps you can do the same…
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We cannot change the world until we accept we are the world. This is the new conversation.