Muddling On

We're made to muddle on.

We can race like an old north wind or plod along at the speed of warmed up mud.  Call it tenacity or persistence or sheer stubbornness, but whether it's small things like housebreaking a dog or medium things like teaching yourself plumbing on line or huge things like fighting cancer up to your last breath - we muddle on.  It's hard and unfair and sometimes downright impossible but it's always better than the alternative of six feet under.   We're all terminal, as my friend Tricia reminds me, all dying from the moment we're born.  It's all just a matter of time so we muddle on.

I've reached the point in my life where people I care about are dying.  It's a natural and expected turn of events and I undoubtedly spend too much time thinking about it, possibly because I spent so little time thinking about it before.  You never think about not being here when you're young - it's like looking at the sky and realizing that it's infinite - it always has been but it doesn't cross your mind much.  And then one day it comes to you, usually a little late, that maybe it's time to consider matters of faith and retirement accounts and cemetery plots and final wishes.  It's something of a shock to realize that I actually listen to commercials for life insurance these days, sometimes even come within a hair's breath of taking down a toll free number.
Mortality has never been much more than a disagreeable word to me.  I give it all the space and freedom it needs as long as it's not looking my way.

But here and now, with the news of an old friend's second bout with cancer on my mind and gnawing at my heart, I realize that muddling on is all there is and all we can do.  Time to draw the blinds and close the shutters, I think to myself, lock the doors and pretend it's not happening - though I've fought through it a hundred times over, I still keep a little denial tucked under my pillow - just in case.  There isn't enough to last very long and I can't afford to waste it.

It doesn't matter who you are or what your money can buy or where you are on this world, my grandmother liked to tell us, the tides are inevitable.  They come in and they go out on their own timetable and like it or not, they carry us with them.

And so reality ebbs and flows as sure and certain as the tides.

And we muddle on.