Seasons....

There is a lovely passage in Ecclesiastes that talks about the changes time induces in the pageant of a human life.

To every thing there is a season,
And a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Simon and Garfunkel aside, there is a lot of truth in those words, a truth that I see more clearly as time passes, and I approach that season of life known as middle age. [Yes, I am approaching mid-life, I am most emphatically not already there. I refuse to admit that at 48, I am already on the downhill slope. All right, I will acknowledge that I may be teetering awkwardly on the precipice, but I will not go down without a fight.]

If the 20's are a time to accumulate, the 40's seem to be a time to disperse. Over the last few years, I have begun economizing on everything. I have cut back on snacks. I don't really buy bottled water any more. I try to purchase only what we absolutely need. Lack of financial where-with-all has certainly been an imperative to that tighter spending, of course, but I think I was heading there, anyway, because it has come pretty easily to me.

I realized, like a light bulb going on in my head a few years ago, that there is a limit to the amount of "stuff" a person needs in a lifetime. I think I may be reaching the saturation point in my own life, because where it used to be fun to acquire, right now, more stuff is starting to sound like more work. The more you have, the more you have to put away, or find a space for, or do something with. I'm too tired, too packed, too overwhelmed, to find space for more stuff that I don't really need.

It used to be kind of fun to receive an invitation to a home party where something will be sold. There was entertainment value in the challenge of finding something for myself that I could justify on the basis of need. These days, I view those party invitations with skepticism and dismay. I have enough tupperware to throw three parties. I have pampered my inner chef until it's well done. I have bejeweled myself and my daughter like royalty. The candles flaming around my home are the remnants of a poorly made decision more years ago than I care to admit. [I will just say that when you pay that much for a candle, you want to get your money's worth out of it, so you don't want to just burn it up. Ah, the irony of it all.]

I am just no longer in acquiring mode, it seems. I have reached belonging saturation, and there is simply no more need, to say nothing of room in my house, for additional stuff. In fact, I have aggressively gone through my possessions recently to winnow out the unneeded items, ruthlessly whittling down the wants from the needs and passing them to a charitable organization that may have more use for them.

I hasten to say that this does not mean that I no longer have anything that is important to me, that everything is on the block and up for grabs. I have some precious items that are priceless to me, and couldn't be replaced for any amount of money, even if they don't look all that valuable to someone else's eyes. And there are certainly things I would like to have that are not currently under my ownership, too.

But for the most part, the things I want now are not the flashy little things that you want in your 20's, the things that you work so hard to acquire so that you can show the world how successful you are. When you are 20, it's all about quantity, it seems, whether you are talking about friends or possessions. It's a race to see who can get the most, and the winner is the one with the most of everything.

My true wish list consists of boring fare these days. At 40, I am not looking for flashy clothes or the latest hairstyle. Instead, I desperately need new carpeting for my living room and I would love to install hardwood floors in my dining room. Of course, there is obviously no point, with a cat and two dogs who feel free to vomit on any piece of carpeting not covered by a piece of furniture. In fact, they seem to prefer the areas that are right out in the middle of the floor, if you want to know the truth.

I would love to replace the doors and windows in my house, because the ones I have leak air like a sieve, and rot out more often than I can keep up with them. I would replace them with vinyl exterior windows, so that I would never again have to deal with a rotted sill or a rotted frame, thus saving me hours of grief and a lot of money in the long run.

I would like to replace my roof, which is 13 years old and probably not going to last forever, or even much longer. I would like to have the house repainted, because I hate the color, and want to make a change. I would like to buy a new fridge, one that is more functional, and which would actually hold enough food for the three of us.

Those are not the exciting things we put on our wish list to Santa. The season of childhood is magical, and Santa is the biggest purveyor of the glittering fairy dust thrown into the eyes of children. When I was growing up, I didn't really believe in Santa, because that was not the way my parents presented him to me. I have no regrets about that, I raised my own children the same way. There is a reason for that particular season, and it is not to have an overweight stranger bringing presents through the chimney. I probably don't really get, at a gut level, what Santa means to children, because he never meant that to me. But Christmas is still magical to me, even with too much to do, and the magic mostly shoved onto the back burner along with everything else.

When I make out my Christmas list, those things won't be on it. They are my heart of heart wishes, the things I wish I had the money to buy, the things that I would spend my lottery win on, if I participated. But it's not the season of my life to make those changes, it seems, so instead, I will focus on the smaller objectives, and ask the Santa's in my life for things that are reasonable and attainable, and hopefully frivolous and fun as well.

My daughter asked me the other day what I wanted for Christmas, and before I could respond, she said, "Don't say nothing, because you know we are all going to get you something, so it might as well be something you want." How to explain to a 16 year old that I already have everything I want? Anything more is almost too much, so bountiful has God been to me in the seasons I have experienced so far.

But this changing of the seasons goes deeper than just the material belongings we can see and touch, the tangibles that we treasure and insure and lose sleep over. There are seasons in our relationships as well, and as we pass through the various stages in our life journey, we pick up and drop off a wide variety of people for different reasons at different times.

In talking with several close friends recently, I have realized that I am not the only one who is aware of this change. Many of them agreed that this seems to be the time of life in which we look at the relationships in our lives, and make decisions about their importance to us, and for the first time, we let some go because we are just not in the same place in our lives any more.

That is not a statement about the people themselves. They are, for the most part, wonderful people, who were once very close to our hearts, but who, for a variety of reasons, are now in a different place in our circle, and we in theirs. Sometimes you move, and realize the affinity was one of proximity more than actual affection, so you allow that relationship to fade as naturally as the sun will set in the Western sky. Sometimes you have a sharp disagreement about something so dear to your heart that you simply cannot overlook the breach. Sometimes there is an overstepping of boundaries so profound that it cannot be overcome. And sometimes, the relationship is simply no longer reflective of who you are or what is important to you, and it fades like the pictures in an old album - cherished, valued, important, but real in memory only.

I have learned that the 40's are a busy time of life. For most women that age, their children are in high school and college, so they find themselves in the work force and trying to catch up with the time, and co-workers, that have rushed past them. They do the difficult double duty of being full time mothers while still being productive full time workers who climb the ladder of employment success. You have endless rounds of activities, which require enormous amounts of time and effort, squeezed in when you aren't busy doing everything you normally do for everyone else. Your sense of yourself gets lost, at least temporarily, because you are simply too busy living everyone else's lives at that moment.

During the hustle and bustle, it seems that it is all too easy to lose track of old friends, and even near ones, sometimes. You don't usually mean for it to happen, but one day, you realize, when you make out your Christmas card list or you look through a photo album, that you haven't seen someone in a very long time, maybe years, and you aren't even sure where they are in their lives any more.

A week or so ago, my Bible study group discussed this very issue, in the context of the Bible study for this month. It is a sensation that was familiar to every woman in the room, each of us, I think, recalling a relationship from the past that had faded away for one reason or another.

We are, our intrepid little group, a mixed bunch. At 48, I am the youngest, and am fortunate enough to learn what is in store for me first hand from the varied wisdom of everyone else. We are in the various seasons of life, like everyone, with some being grandmothers with grandchildren not much younger than the youngest child we have amongst us. Yet we have more commonalities than differences, and although we have a wide array of personalities, no two of us are anything alike, we do benefit from and vicariously enjoy life through each other's eyes. And we have the opportunity to learn from each other, as well.

And so it was, when we talked about the seasons of friendship, that one of those women told a tale from her own life that reminded us all of the one thing about the seasons that is most important. She told how she and her husband had best friends, with whom they did many things and spent a lot of time.

The friends moved to another city, and they slowly drifted apart, until one day, she spotted her friend in town on a visit, and the friend hadn't even called to tell her they were there. How hurtful, how evident, that the friendship had lost it's way, and the demise had already occurred unannounced.

But there was a happy ending after all, because the couple moved back to town, they slowly reconnected, and found that they did, indeed, have as much in common as they always had, and they are, once again, the closest of friends. The storyteller made it clear that the loss went both ways, and that the reunion did as well, but the real lesson is that in the hustle and bustle of life, sometimes we do drop a ball or two, and it can roll away.

But as long as you know where the wall is, as long as the ball eventually stops rolling, you don't have to chase it to find it again. Sometimes, you just have to wait for it to stop rolling, and then you can walk over and pick it up.

If there is someone you have lost - a friendship gone wrong, a relationship that has taken a wrong turn - remember that in the course of life, the seasons change. You never know, one day you may find yourselves in each other's paths once again, exploring the new season together.