I’ve never been much of a rollercoaster person.
However, it was Kim’s 30th birthday, and this kind-hearted friend of mine rarely asked for anything more than to pass the salt across the table. And when her only birthday request was to go to an amusement park with her closest friends, I had to say yes—and I had to say it with an enthusiastic squeal.
So there I was. Against my better judgment. Strapped to a rickety seat in my estimation and inwardly preparing to be flung out into eternity.
(Happy Birthday, Kiiiiim!)
From what I could tell, the ride was just a straight shot for the first few seconds, no death-drop immediately at least. However. I was not prepared for the power with which the rollercoaster blasted us forward (at approximately one million miles per second.) We may have been going straight, but my stomach dropped to the floor as if we were free-falling from the sky. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I may have perished momentarily.
I’m telling you this because I have found myself going back to that memory in recent years. Not only because I likely obtained a tinge of PTSD, but also because after I entered my thirties, it was like I sat back down on that rollercoaster and life started blasting forward at the same ungodly pace.
Suddenly, the seasons are coming and going so quickly I barely have a minute to notice. By the time I hang up my last sweater for the winter, cherry blossoms are exploding all over the city. And with every glance in the mirror, another wrinkle seems to be making itself at home on my face.
What I’m saying is that sometimes life is flying by so fast it knocks the wind out of me. This is the kind of thing you can be lighthearted about when you’re young and free and running around barefoot in fields of daisies. But as we mature, the brevity of life forces it’s way rudely into our awareness; our delusion of invincibility begins to fall apart— year by year, wrinkle by wrinkle, and bit by wobbly bit.
I vividly remember sitting in a restaurant at 29-years-old when my date took it upon himself to inform me that I was “in my prime.” His poetic way of saying, act now while your ovarian supplies last. Suffice it to say, that was the end of that romance. But his words continued to haunt me long after that night… was he right? Was it really all downhill from there?
Upon entering my thirties, I found myself in an Alice in Wonderland sort of situation. I was trapped inside an ever-shrinking room with no way out, which is the sort of thing that can really make a person panic, especially if this person is a bit claustrophobic.
The more days that passed, the more I was drowning under the weight of societal pressures, irrational fears, and my own unrealized dreams. I had no idea how deeply my spirit was longing to break free from the prison my own mindset had created for me.
In all my frizzy frazzle-dazzle, I had forgotten the kind of Father I have. I had forgotten His lavish, long-suffering, unrelenting, unchanging love. I had forgotten that He withholds nothing good from those he loves. Nothing.
And it was this remembering that gave me the courage I needed to deal with the whole morality thing. It loosened my grip on the clock, tore down the walls closing in on me, and let me off the gosh-forsaken rollercoaster.
I could breathe again.
The very difficult thing about life is that it rarely listens to us. You say go right and it takes a sharp left. You say jump and it lays down and plays dead. This life of ours is a wayward, maddening thing.
But this is actually not our biggest problem.
What leads us into a suffocating prison situation is our own unwillingness to accept reality for what it is. We work ourselves up into a tizzy attempting to control this stubborn life-thing, and all the while, we are miserable, aging creatures missing out on the precious days and weeks we have on earth.
Maybe part of what makes our lives fly by the way they do is that we are so preoccupied with controlling them, we aren’t really present in them. Rather than actively participating in our lives, we are marching around outside of it with picket signs: “No, no we won’t get old!” (Or something of that nature.)
Acceptance is the only way to embrace the life we have been given. But this kind of thing is counter-intuitive in a society that thrives off of our delusions of control. How many billions of dollars are we willing to throw away to push off the reality of our weakening bodies and lack of immortality?
The heartbreaking truth is that the more we invest in this lie, the more we grow to despise ourselves. We are forking over our most valuable resources to hide from the world… and even worse, to hide from ourselves.
The maturing man or woman in you deserves more than this. He or she deserves to be fully seen, fully known, and fully loved. But we cannot be truly loved or known when we are in hiding.
And isn’t this what we long for the most during our precious time on earth? To be known, to be loved, to belong? These are the deepest longings of our hearts and we have pushed them out of reach by feeding this illusion of invincibility.
Maybe where we need to begin is by telling ourselves the truth, and saying, “Self, you are getting old and wrinkly and rickety, but I accept you nonetheless.”
And maybe then we can present ourselves to the world without shame and without fear, and thus experience the deepest sense of love and belonging our hearts could ever imagine. Maybe it is in this kind of love that will can taste eternity.
Indeed, our days may be short…but may they also be full.