For me, mapping my life is a process of reflection, not projection. I have not done much long range planning in my life. But when I look back, I can see, as if from an airplane, all the twists and turns my life has taken, and all of it makes sense now. I have always been a person for whom the line between Point A and Point B is wiggly, sometimes tortuous, never straight. But I always got there.
One of the things I love about aging is the perspective I have now. What seemed like uncharted wilderness–full of brambles, steep cliffs, treacherous crossings, predatory beasts—from this point now looks like a clearly defined path. One I was always following, one that came from the grace of the universe, that brought me to where I am. Right here. Right now.
“God looks after drunks and idiots:”. I have been both, many times over in my almost 70 years on the planet. I lived to tell the tale. And now I am telling it on my terms, not somebody else’s notion of what constitutes “good enough” or successful or worthy. I spent a lot of years being lost in the wilderness, but now I see that I always was following an internal compass. It was frequently an invisible compass, but it was and is very real.
Recently, for some reason, I have been reflecting on my senior year of high school. That year we read Waiting for Godot and I almost stood up and cheered, because somehow it looked to me that Samuel Beckett had captured the nowhere place I was in. To see the frozen, apathetic, damped down place I was in reflected in the pages of that play made me feel less alone. I had been thrown up on the shore after a huge thrashing that felt like being tumbled in a tsunami. I was numb, I was broken, and I was going through the motions of being a high school kid while I felt hollowed out and ancient and there was this uncrossable space between me and everyone else in my life. It took me decades to come back to myself, and the whole time, even though I couldn’t see it, I was following a path.
I am grateful that I have lived long enough (in spite of myself, sometimes) to see this. I am grateful that I did not wrap a car around a tree. That I did not end up being murdered in the East Village in 1968, that I did not drown in Dippikill Pond when I went swimming blind drunk, that I did not get hit by a train or fall to my death on several drunken crossing of railroad bridges, on foot, in the dark. I am grateful that my sense of adventure was not permanently eradicated by early events in my life. It took time to recover my adventurous self, but she is back.