Life can be a grand enigma

Life can be a grand enigma.  It has a plethora of changes, vicissitudes that send us sprouting in all sorts of directions.  This week, for many of us, tax season is one of those catastrophic ‘down turns’ that leaves us feeling beat and battered.  That seems the story of adulthood, for anyone longing to get there, and I think, if we’re honest, we’ve all been the child longing for a watershed birthday.  Sixteen and drive, 18 and adult, 21, drink, graduate, simmer, sew, steady, and move on seem to be ultimate goals we possess for ourselves, if born mostly of vast immaturity.  What we don’t realize, as we strive to toss out the years, is just how quickly time actually moves.  “Don’t wish your life away” was a constant warning in my life. I might have listened more closely, both to my elders and my own inner voice.

Though we may not know its name or where it comes from, or, even at times, how to suppress it, there’s a deep moment of yearning in each of us. It’s a swell in the heart – a gnawing stab in the gut – when we are conscious that time is fleeting and our path is not yet properly directed or decided. I can remember that feeling, even deep into my childhood, believing, perhaps naively, that I had something momentous to accomplish. Decidedly, I have often surmised that this longing was the voice of God; certainly of the subconscious warning the conscious of the stealth movement of the clock. That old friend returned from sabbatical recently when I heard Randy Owen sing the song, “Feels So Right.” If you made a soundtrack of my childhood, you’d hear a lot of Randy Owen, the lead singer of the band Alabama.

Owen’s voice and the stories he told on Country Road TV’s Larry’s Country Diner slipped me right back into wistful days of youth, days that I sometimes long to see return.  There was a simpleness then and a respectability that we seem to have let slip away.  It seems imperative that, while we sit in a changing world, we’d possess a similar reaction to the days of yesteryear:  a swell in the heart and a stab in the gut to tell us time is making its final etching and that we have decisions to make for tomorrow, a conundrum that’s true of all of us, regardless of our age or station. For me, that will always be re-grounding myself in the most important of things – family, faith, growth, joy, a good walk in the footsteps of the past – and finding ways to re-immerse myself, despite the ticking clock, in the things that I hold most dear.