longing

There is a feeling that bounces around in the pit of my stomach that I can only describe as longing. It stirs up now and then, and when it does I feel restless, unsettled. I feel like something doesn’t quite fit – my clothes, my skin, my life. It happens less these days than it once did, but still it’s there.

I don’t think it’s uncommon.

In your 20s and 30s, you’re busy plotting out a course to the future. School and career and marriage and home and kids – each block stacked one on top of the other. It’s big and exciting and all-consuming, and then one day you look up and realize that you’ve built an entire life. You’re somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother and somebody’s colleague and after the dizziness of it wears off a little you look around in wonder and think, wow, how the hell did this happen?

Then comes the business of managing it all. This part is full of figuring out schedules and budgets, playdates and date nights. Building little fences to keep it all together, to prevent it all from going off the tracks. It is a maze of the tiniest details: Doctor’s appointments and winter boots and soccer practices and lost teeth and the first time the pet fish turns up dead. It’s no small feat, navigating this, and if you’re in the midst of it now just know that you’re doing a wonderful job. Carry on, carry on.

Eventually you do figure it out, sort of. You get a handle on it, at least. You find, as I recently read, “A routine baggy enough to live in.” It’s not that the busy-ness goes away, but you’ve grown used to it. It’s no longer overwhelming. Everything quiets down a bit. You breathe.

And then the longing shows up. A faint knock on the door. A small stirring in the depths of you.

This is where things can get tricky, because you don’t quite know what the longing is for. Sometimes it’s as simple as a good night’s sleep, so you don’t want to go upending your life when a nice, long nap would do. But other times it’s more than that. It’s calm, or connection, or creativity, or a walk in the woods, or the smell of the ocean or all sorts of other things.

Your only hope – our only hope – of figuring it out is to listen. Not to be afraid of that restless whisper, or to try to drown it or shut it out. Just listen, and follow it when you can. And remember that, for me, at least, it’s one of those things where the journey matters more than the destination. The magic is in the going, not in the getting there.

Maybe the magic is in the longing itself.

With love. xx

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.

Herman Hesse

(Photo by Aleksandra Boguslawska on Unsplash)