Today I am stuck. I am Alice, in the hallway with doors and gardens and keys on glass tables that I can make out but cannot reach. There are choices to be made, lists to be written, goals to be planned. There is time to do it all, and yet, strangely, I am aware of a new, unfamiliar sense that there is not as much time as there used to be.
I am not one to lament the passage of years, particularly. If my youth was misspent, so be it. I made some good choices and some bad ones, mostly good. I spent the last day of my university career in the sunshine with beer and friends and a football when I should have been reviewing Spenser’s Faerie Queen for my final. Many, many years later, I have forgotten much (if not all) of my studies in Elizabethan English, but I haven’t forgotten that day in the sun. Maybe my choice was the right one, maybe it wasn’t. My hair looks better now than it did then; I am the same and yet different, and for the most part, I have been lucky. But middle age is hard. Life is busy, even hectic, and yet, I am suspended in time, held in place by mysterious forces of personality and will and habit that make it difficult to change and move. Maybe all these things are true. Or, maybe (maybe?) today is simply just a bad day.
When I was a kid, I remember so clearly the first time I read Judith Vorst’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible No Good Very Bad Day. I thought (even then) that it captured an aspect of human nature-–THE BAD MOOD--in such a tangible, and real way. Now that I’m a adult, I call it being stuck. I become indecisive, petulant, argumentative. Everything feels difficult. But the cause is the same now as it was then: being misunderstood, feeling left out, unheard. And in some ways, in the middle years, it is more frequent, harder now to accept, and slower to shift.
And that is today. Or maybe it was yesterday. In any case, I think of Alexander.
Some days are like that.
Even in middle age.
Comments