This would be my 200th post.
The blog is officially retired, and I write elsewhere now.
But what is strange is that I don’t feel at home anywhere else. This is the place where my words first made their way into the ether that is the internet, this is where I wrote with freedom and abandon, this is the place where I first discovered my love for words.
I am not sentimental about home, you probably know that if you have read my posts. I have lost count (literally) of the number of houses I have lived in, and I move countries and cities with an ease that sometimes puts me in the side of abnormal. It is what it is, and what has always been. Lately, though, I have started having a sort of nostalgia, I find myself in old contexts, revisiting familiar circumstances, catching up with old friends, checking in with alumni groups, that sort of thing. The impulse to just keep moving forward, the past blown away in the dust of forward movement – that is sort of diminishing. It must be to do with middle age. I do feel mature, and I am getting to a stage (or perhaps I already am, who knows), where there is likely to be more life (in years at least) in my past than in the future. It is actually a wonderful feeling.
My daughter recently called me a boomer. A boomer I certainly am not. That was the generation of my parents. I corrected her, and told her I am either a Millenial or a Gen X, depending on which generational definition you use. “Oh, whatever,” was the reply. A member of the Generation Alpha, anyone born in the last millenium, millenial or not, could be a boomer for all she cares. I smiled, I had not heard about the Generation Alpha until she had enlightened me about it. I guess when you are the Alpha, starting out a new cycle, everyone else is just part of a large “old” cycle. “The narcissim of small differences,” perhaps.
In any case, I had expected midlife to be rather droll. But I am so much more looking forward to it than any other phase of my life. It is a strange feeling, in a way it is a time where I feel grounded. Calmer. Ready to experience, rather than to rush forward. Perhaps I do not still use “Whatever,” as freely as daughters use the term, but that is how I feel towards so many things. “Whatever.” That strange calm of letting things flow just as they flow, without feeling the need to intervene and change and shape. It does not mean that I am a passive observer. Far from it. I find myself immersing in life with joy and abandon, and if life brings emotions that are less about joy and more about sadness, then I embrace that with the same abandon, for it is that color and breadth that adds to the tapestry of life, isn’t it.
In a way, at this stage in life, I am curious to see what life will paint for me if I go with the flow, rather than the obsessive urge I had in my younger days to design and draw the painting myself. Perhaps I was lucky in life, or perhaps I was just like everybody else, probably more the latter – but what I feel is lucky. And it has given me a faith in the universe. I no longer try to shape and reshape everything through sheer force and will (teens and thirties, I think). I no longer observe and judge, as I did during the cynical phase of my life (twenties, it was, for me). This phase is to immerse. To live. To experience.
So, yes, it seems I retired the blog.
I am supposed to write elsewhere.
But then, I say, “Whatever.”
This is home, and here I am. I intend to fully use my hard-earned, age-given freedom to say, “Whatever.”
Here’s to the next 200 posts and more!