There are moments that mark your life:
Falling in love. Leaving home. Your first time on a plane. Getting your heart broken. Your first-real-proper job. Doing something you never thought you could.
There are also moments that break you open: a parent’s divorce. An unwanted diagnosis. Losing a loved one. Betrayal. Becoming a mother. Writing a book. Sitting face to face with your doctor as she throws around the word ‘cancer’.
They say challenges are what makes life interesting. And that overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
In a month I will turn 40. Those who have come before me have realised through lived experience that it’s just another run on the board. Those much older are simply grateful to be alive.
But there’s something really confronting and disconcerting about reaching middle-age. In your 20s you think you’re invincible. Beyond your 40s it all feels a little inevitable.
Many years ago, I sat beside my grandad’s hospital bed for hours as he took his last, laboured breaths. Aside from a few funerals since then, that was the last time I had stared death in the face. Now, I sit in the doctors office in a haze as the words ‘test results’, ‘abnormality’, ‘low grade’, ‘high grade’, ‘cancer risk’, ’part of life’, ‘it’ll be fine’, tumble out so matter of factly. Words of cold comfort are engulfed by searing flames that set me alight until there’s nothing but these crippling thoughts on constant loop:
It won’t happen to me
It may happen to me
It can’t happen to me
It will happen to me
It can’t happen to me
It can’t happen to me
Anxiety is a bitch.
It’s a sobering realisation as you get older: an invincibility gives way to inevitability.
I’m not sure if death itself is something I’m scared of. All I know is I’m terrified of suffering —or missing out. I’ve come to realise that my only wish now is to see my kids start a family of their own one day.
If I let myself think about it for long enough, the thought of my children growing up without their mum destroys me. This kind of love is both a blessing and a curse. Who will remember to pay their excursion fee? That they like their apples cut the morning of? That on Tuesdays they wear their faction shirt. That they prefer a specific spoon for their cereal and their sandwiches cut in squares, not triangles? No one else knows how I tuck them into bed each night, just so.
I feel a sense of despair for what is but a gratitude for what I do have, right here, right now. The paradox of life is that there is both so much to lose and so much to live for.
It’s hard not to fight it or fear dying. We have so little say in how much time we have here.
But I guess what we do have is the chance to decide how we spend it. You can’t give your life more time, so give your time more life. After all, to be able to wake up to another day and be able to choose how we spend it is a gift not everyone gets.
When was the last time you took a good look at the world around you? I’m talking a real, proper inhale of every day miracles.
The hypnotic sway of a tree. Birds in formation. The first exhale of the day. A blue sky that will give way to a pastel sunset by day’s end. Clouds that dance above us, the heavens opening. Life in your belly. The sound of rainbow lorrikeets marking their territory. The ripples in the ocean and a child’s delightful shriek as they elude a wave. Leaves changing colour with the turn of a new season. Love that lasts the ages. The sheer relief (and joy!) of your first morning coffee. A smile from a stranger. The heartbeat I feel on my husband’s chest. His arms around me that feel like home. My two children: miracles in human form constantly enveloped in pure, unadulterated happiness. To bottle this all up would be too much. But I don’t want to miss a thing.
I get the feeling that in our final days of life, all that will matter is this:
that the best things in life aren’t things.
And maybe that’s the greatest lesson of all: that there’s miracles everywhere…but only if you’re willing to look deep enough.
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