BASTARD BRIDGE
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past week looking through old journal entries, work I had written in college English courses, articles I have saved over the years and now my home office looks like a tornado blew through it. I couldn’t be any more satisfied with the chaos that surrounds me as I am beginning to embark on the journey of actually doing what I’ve wanted to do for so long. I still have so much to type out to put in the OTHER WORKS section, and I hope that I am given the time to make it happen. So far, I’m finding myself caught up in the euphoria I once felt when I was a student in the English program at Alabama. I’ll never forget the moment that the fire ignited and I knew this was a passion that would never be able to be extinguished.
I met with a mentor/community colleague (who I am also lucky to call a friend) this morning for coffee and I am constantly inspired by the people with whom I get to interact in my “grown up job.” The more meetings I have with people in a given day/week/month/year, the more I discover that you will never get to the bottom of them: I love this element of human interaction. Some people profess to be very simple but I disagree. There is so much depth to everyone you encounter and sometimes you are lucky to get ¾ of the way to the bottom. We were talking about life (as we usually end up doing) and the conversation led down the path of me recently losing my mother. Her death has served as the catalyst of my diving head first into writing in a public setting. I used to talk to her about it often and she always would encourage me to do it; I was just always too chicken shit to actually get it out there in fear that I would be mislabeled or judged. She would always laugh at me and tell me that if I was worried about being mislabeled or judged I would be less open in my day to day life (or, she would sometimes tell me I was a bull in a china shop—surprise). In hindsight, she had a point.
I left my meeting this morning reflecting on our conversation and while driving back to my office the sentiment of finality hit me: we never quite know when our time will come to cross the bridge to move on to the next phase of our life, or even on to the next life. I recently read an article on one of my favorite sites, Elephant Journal. The article addressed death and the grieving process. In particular, the text that spoke the most to me was as follows:
“…words nudging you across the bridge of your old life, where your dear one was alive, to your new life, where they’re not. It is not a bridge you wanted to cross—you hate this bastard bridge. But you can’t turn back.” (http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/08/how-to-survive-the-loss-of-someone-we-cant-live-without/)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about moments in life that serve as opportunities for great change. We commonly ignore them for a multitude of reasons: commitments/obligations, poor timing, lack of financial resources, fear, et. Al. However, those moments that force us to cross over in to the next phase of our life can be laden with doubt, fear and even resentment. It took my mother dying to shift my mind into forward-thinking overdrive, and it’s an overdrive I’m finding some level of resentment in—I wasn’t ready for this. Yet, I’ve been considering a lot of things this year but have recoiled back a little based on what I mentioned above. It led me to consider the decision-making process of life all over again: if you knew you had such little time to accomplish something, would you take a leap of faith and cross the bridge, ignoring your fear? Or would it take something tragic happening to force you into the direction of uncertainty?
I think life is comprised of many of these moments for everyone—if we knew when our time would end or how liberating a life-changing decision could be before the moment actually occurred, no one would have regret or longing for something more or better. Sometimes bad things have to happen in order to wake us up to how homeostatic and complacent we become in our daily lives. When you consider the time we do have on this earth, with the assumption that we do life a full life, it happens so quickly so we shouldn’t stop and think too long about taking the road less traveled. My mother was right about this sentiment—we shouldn’t sit around too long waiting for good things to happen all the time because good things don’t happen all the time; sometimes, we have to take a leap of faith and trust that we will just be all right and happiness is waiting on the other side of the bridge for us.
My mom and I had many conversations this year about finding happiness in life and surrounding ourselves with those who enhance our spirit without hindrance. She and I were oil and water, but one thing we always agreed upon was how to love. As I sit and think about all of the things we talked about this year I am finding myself met with dissonance for facing the rest of my adult life without her. Death is inevitable, I am wholly aware of this being an only child. What I could never predict is how difficult it would be to walk across the bridge without my mother or father as an adult only child. The author of the article I referenced was right: I hate this bastard bridge, but I’ve got to keep crossing it and I can’t turn back. I can only have faith that in this transition of my life, I am making the decisions necessary to live the remainder of it to its fullest surrounded by those who enhance it.
-BWT
“The most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”