I’m sitting in a café. The space is all light and greenery. Plants abound: dangling from rafters, towering in corners. I’m at a table made of a beautiful old wood with pale yellow tones, sitting on a white bench by a big window. I lean against the wall under a framed portrait. Outside a fine mist falls from the sky. The rain drops are so small I can’t see them but they keep the street freshly wet.
I sip a spoonful of my tomato soup, turn the page in my book, set down the book to make a note in my notebook about how I want to make more time for reading. And for taking walks, even in the winter that’s around the corner. And for eating soups.
A chorus repeats as it has in my life these past few years: Do less. Be more. Do less. Be more. Do far less. Just be.
I close my eyes and imagine a welcome guest joining me at the table. She’s holding a mug, a chai latte, and she sits down across from me. She’s in her sixties and is simply lovely. Her eyes wrinkle from a lifetime of squinting at stars in the night sky. She exudes ease. It trails behind her like a scent, changing everything it touches. Her hands are soft and aged and while they move lightly they hold memory of all the hands she’s held tenderly in her own as she’s made space for people and their feelings. As she’s helped them lessen their burdens while also lessening hers.
She takes my hands in hers now, in my imagination.
My own eyes look back at me kindly.
She is me in twenty years.
“Hello, love,” she says in a slightly deeper and more textured version of my voice.
“How are you?” she asks, even though she knows.
I tell her of my happiness. My ideas for what I want next. My love for Colt and its leaps and turns and growth over the years. My delight over Isla and her precious little voice. The heavy things I carry, though lighter than they’ve been, from the trauma and abuse of the past few years.
“I don’t know what healed is, I tell her, but I am healing,” “I think what’s most profound is what happens within the healing. It isn’t the stitching together of the wound but what happens next - the returning to what was. What is. What was always there. It’s the the returning to our simplest, purest selves. The selves we are for all of time.”
“Mmmm” she says.
She already knows.
“Truth,” she says. One of our favorite words. Values. Battle cries.
“Return to truth.”
You might think I want to hear some things from her: Everything turns out great. It’s all easy from here. You’re doing wonderfully. Don’t worry. You’re okay. It’s all okay.
I don’t.
This is enough. Our words to live by. When the leaves fall from the trees, when Colt and I disagree, as Isla grows and becomes something more separate from me, through the challenges of work and life and all the inevitable aching, return to truth.
She doesn’t know anything I don’t know, because she’s in my imagination. Her words are my words. They’re already in me.
We are already all the ages we have been and will be. As I become her, I’ll simply be returning to truth.
How much time do you spend with yourself? How well do you know what’s at your center? What’s underneath all the things that have happened to you? Who were you at three, at eight, at nineteen? What’s in not all the questions you’ve asked but all the things you’ve always known with certainty? What’s there? How does that manifest in your life? Now and later and later still, how will it?
I open my eyes and let them adjust to the light.
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