You’re Invited

It’s the Big Show

Journal: 25 October, 2024, morning.

Here I am. Alive. Another day in this, my life.

We are in Austin, having arrived yesterday late afternoon, choosing to travel on Thursday instead of Friday and thus reducing the number of fellow travelers we must share the roads with by a considerable amount. Neither of us slept well the night before and it was a relief to arrive, stand up, stretch, receive exuberant hugs from the littles, and have lovely wine and pizza for dinner. We did the minimal evening preparations: brushing teeth, setting up the coffee machine, goodnight hugs and kisses. Then bed. Bliss. I thought I’d sleep longer than usual but no, here I am, awake at 3:30 AM, in a sleeping house, with only the house noises for company. The kids got an ice maker machine and it hums and clicks and softly beeps now and then. It’s a comforting sound.

Has life always been such a surreal mixture of the mundane and the things that make your hair stand on end? Probably, but I think I knew less back in the Before Times and so life seemed more uneventful, and the blurring of time passing just softens things. Mercifully, we forget.

I heartily wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know back then. It would be so much easier to not know. But I do. The only practical and pertinent question is what do I do with that knowledge? So much is out of my ability to control, or even to influence, and that’s always scary, isn’t it? If we’re being truthful here?

The short writing I’m sharing here is one I’ve saved for a long time. Whatever we are in the midst of, whatever is happening in our lives, in the world, each morning that we wake, again, alive, is an invitation: to live, to *be* alive, to *be*. No matter the state of things, I want to embrace that invitation. I want to accept it with joy.

“I get the invitation every morning when I wake up to actually live a life of complete engagement, a life of whimsy, a life of love. It doesn’t come in an envelope. It’s ushered in by a sunrise, the sound of a bird, or the smell of coffee drifting lazily from the kitchen. It's the invitation to actually live life, to fully participate in this amazing life for one more day. Turning down this invitation comes in lots of flavors. It looks like numbing yourself or distracting yourself or seeing something really beautiful as just normal. It can also look like refusing to forgive or not being grateful or getting wrapped around the axle with fear or envy. I think every morning we receive an invitation to live and sometimes we forget to show up or get head-faked into thinking we haven’t really been invited, but you see, we have been invited – every new day, all over again.”

I’m not saying this is easy. It’s not.

I just want to live joyfully more than I want to live fearfully.

So… here we go, into another day of… what? I don’t know. Neither do you. Shall we walk into it with bravery and determination? With anticipation? With plans to embrace it fully? Whatever may come? Let’s do that. We can do that.

#journalingalife