Several years ago, it occurred to me that I was living a life I did not wish to be living. I was stressed, angry, and completely un-peaceful. I was constantly rushing about frantically, driven by the confines of time as dictated by my calendar.
In short, my life felt out of control, or in other words, it felt like it was not even mine to control.
Whether gradually or at a singular point in time, I came to realize that I was a competent adult living in a free country and that I got to CHOOSE how I did or didn’t live my life. I could sculpt it, chisel away at it little by little until my insides matched my outsides, which is how I once heard the word integrity defined.
Today, a good day is when I open my phone and see nothing on my calendar, and in complete transparency, this is how almost every day on my calendar now appears. I have very few scheduled weekly events—one being a horseback riding lesson (which often cancels or changes at the last minute) and the other being church. And I have never been happier, despite the most recent deluge of heart-breaking, chaotic, and strange twilight-zone events (which I will later describe).
I always believed I was a “Type-A” personality—organized, put-together, and perhaps a bit rigid when life didn’t go as planned. But with the gift of age, I began taking inventory. Outwardly, I presented one way, but my insides weren’t matching up. To the visiting eye, my countertops were clean and free of clutter. But to those who had free range to my house, every drawer and closet were bulging with hodge-podge messes, hidden catchalls for random odds and ends. Outwardly, my life was scheduled and orderly, often down to thirty-minute increments. But inwardly, I was raging over living a dutiful life of obligation instead of the life I wasn’t brave enough to admit wanting.
Eventually, it dawned on me that I was creative to the core, that I had the roaming heart of a gypsy and that being tied to a schedule felt suffocating and life-stealing. Through these revelations, I began paying more attention to my soft-spoken inner clock than the demanding, loudly ticking one. I exchanged my calendar for an organic, intuitive life…and YET, this did not mean that I was any less “productive.”
Instead of dragging myself out of bed to the dreaded blaring alarm clock, I began rising naturally and routinely at 3:30 a.m. to write a book I was passionately in love with. Instead of eating lunch at 11:00 because, after all, it was “lunch time,” I started paying closer attention to my internal hunger cues, sometimes eating lunch at 10:00 a.m., and often being so absorbed in my writing, I forgot to eat at all. I stopped scheduling things I believed I was supposed to do, trusting instead that I would naturally encounter and intuitively know the next best thing, not only for myself, but my family and others.
Even so, living intuitively or organically, as I have come to call it, is certainly not all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes, this soft-spoken inner voice breaks my heart. With Grayson becoming a senior in high school next year, more and more of mine and Arin’s conversations had started turning toward our thoughts and plans for Grayson upon graduation. The calendar dictated that we needed to come up with a plan by May of 2024.
But after an excessively violent episode one morning last month, my inner clock strongly suggested otherwise. The understanding came in a moment. Historically when Grayson has grown violent, I have been able to capture his neck in the crook of my elbow and trip him backward over my leg, then move into a restraint. But that particular day, he simply lifted me off the ground by the crook of my arm and soldiered determinedly onward, butcher knife in hand, toward his intended target. At that second, I knew. We needed to bump up our external timeline and find Grayson a new place to live.
Over the following week, I cried so many tears that salt burns began scabbing over on my cheeks. It felt unthinkable to send my autistic son to a boarding school, who had never spent a single night away from home except with my mom…and yet, what other choice remained?
The decision had been made for me, and intuitively, I knew it was the only choice to be made. But for once, I wished we could live by the date we’d tentatively set on our invisible, mental calendar.
Arin and I dropped Grayson off in Utah at a school for autistic boys on February 27, ironically, the first day of Orthodox Lent. Historically, intense suffering seems to coincide with Lent, and this year is compliantly following suit.
Now, a child that my life has revolved around day in and day out is strangely and suddenly absent. Additionally, my husband—and anchor—now finds himself working in Texas for two to three weeks every month simply to cover the costs of Grayson’s tuition. Our oldest son left home last February to guide fly-fishing trips in Wyoming. Our subsequent two children left for Florida and Montana six months later. Currently, our family of seven is spread across six different states…and I very often find myself alone on a mountain, ironically with no shortage of time or solitude.
I am daily staring out into a wide-open abyss of nothingness, and the effect is rather dizzying and disorienting. I am no longer a practicing mother. Not really. My book is finished, and I’ve received more agent rejections than I care to admit. My husband, with whom I was one day hoping to experience empty-nesting with is hundreds of miles away, as are my extended family and friends. And I am encountering time, once coveted and rare, as rushing and swirling around me in nauseating abundance.
Orthodox Archimandrite Meletios Webber suggests that in these moments, mentally residing in the past or present seems preferential, for the present “has no shape or form, so there is nothing to measure. Since defining things through labeling and measuring is the main task of the mind, when it comes to something formless, it simply ignores it. The mind prefers to work in the past or future, since these dimensions are both actually constructs of the mind’s own workings and thus the mind can control them the present moment, however, is completely outside its control and therefore completely ignored.”
Nicole M. Roccas, the author of Time and Despondency, writes, “Although such ruminations may cause us pain, it is a pain the mind itself creates and is therefore preferable to the unpredictable vulnerability of the present moment. To root ourselves in the here and now means to surrender to uncertainty and, at times, helplessness.”
And here is where I find myself faced with a choice. Will I respond to the present moment with gratitude, embrace the heartache and suffering, and search for the hidden gift, or will I despond by numbing my pain with cheap and shallow substitutes? Will I seek to evade time by killing it, or will I lean into time’s fullness, though every ticking of the second-hand may feel like a small, painstaking, and lonely eternity?
I determine to seek out the gift. The expansiveness of time that I have long desired now lays stretched out before me like an endless desert, a wilderness of my own to be crossed by me and me only. In the absence of my children and husband, a deep-rooted need to nurture, to care for others, perhaps broken and hurting, begins to arise.
Strangely enough, opportunities quickly emerge. A young man, who has worked for Arin for years prior, loses six of half of his fingers in an oilfield accident. Perhaps, he surprisingly concedes, he will come here to recover. Two days later, I’m driving home in a snowstorm with our oldest daughter, Rylee, who is home for spring break. Winding up our mountain road, I hear a shrill sound. Perhaps a bird? A mountain lion’s shriek? Rylee’s cocked head indicates she, too, has heard the mysterious, out-of-place noise that seems to be replaying in our subconscious in search of a logical compartment. I stop the car and open the windows. Rylee opens her door and stands up in the blowing snow, scanning the opposite mountain for the source of the sound. Nothing but silence. I whistle on a whim, and low and behold, a faraway whistle replies. I reverse my 4runner and drive backward, Rylee still standing propped between the door and my car. My whistle and another far-off whistle.
Then finally, the whistle is closer and Rylee reports hearing a woman’s voice calling out, “Help us.” Before I can stop her, she’s jumped from the car and is peering over a forty- to fifty-foot drop. My ears hear her words, but they don’t register in my brain for several long seconds, “Mom, there’s a car on its side down there, and two people are trying to climb the mountain. They’re really bloody.” Unthinking, I start making a U-turn and almost get stuck in a large drift. I have no cell reception, and these people’s lives are quite literally dependent upon my daughter and me. Fortunately, my 4runner reverses out of the drift like a champ, and within a few seconds, I am by my daughter’s side, staring astonishingly at the two blood-soaked strangers trying to make their way up a snow-covered mountain slope. Her shoulder appears to be broken or dislocated; his nose is reportedly broken; and the blood is too profuse to determine the extent of their head injuries. They repeatedly make it halfway up the slope before sliding back down with agonizing screams. Long story short, we eventually choose to drive home, call for help, and grab a ratchet strap, hoping to tie it beneath their armpits and drag them up the mountainside backward. But by the time we arrive back at the scene, they’ve managed to walk down the frozen creek to a lower embankment and climb out of the ravine. We load them up in our warm car and drive down the hill to meet the ambulance. I don’t know how they’re doing, but I trust they are well on their way to recovery.
Both these events have aided me in viewing time as a gift. Tomorrow is not promised, and our lives dangle precariously by an invisible thread. For me, being present and having an open calendar allow me to live organically, to respond to current needs fluidly instead of trying to figure out how to cram something urgent into a life that already feels pressed.
Of course, I recognize the ability to live this way is a gift. If I was a single mother, my life would look drastically different. If Arin had lost his fingers, our lives would look drastically different. Even so, there are choices to be made every day. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
I find myself waking up to this day in my life that, in many ways, feels chosen for me. Grayson is gone; my other children are gone; Arin is awakening in our house for the first time in twenty-two days, only to leave again in ten. This mountain, while a refuge, also feels daunting and foreboding. Even so, I have a choice.
I can choose to respond or despond. I can choose gratitude, even if I have to work harder some days more than others to find it. I can choose to see beauty, though it be through streaming tears and occasionally despairing pain. And I can choose to see time as an expansive gift, an opportunity to love and be loved, and to view my own emptiness as an impregnable womb of possibility rather than a bleak, gray tomb of death.
In any given set of circumstances, I, too, can choose my attitude, and so I strive, often failing and sliding backwards like the two bloodied victims of the car crash we encountered.
Yet, in reality, what choice remains?
We either strive onward toward life or succumb to our internal deaths.
