Re-evaluating

My right wrist is in a lovely purple cast and there is a plate in my wrist binding the broken bones permanently together. I have become increasingly amidextrous and can type with my left hand and using the right middle finger. I can shower, even put on makeup sorta kinda, but I can't open cans with my manual canopener.

I've had lots of help from my beloved Tony and Princess #1 and from a few friends, though many have offered. I've taken lots of naps. I've watched lots of television. I've read. I'm healing. This will not last forever.

But it's thrown me completely into what lifecoach Martha Beck calls a death-rebirth cycle. I've been reading her Finding Your Own North Star and while I haven't done all the exercises, it has been a revelationary process. I'm taking it all in, sitting and thinking, and just being rather than doing much of anything.

We go through the death-rebirth cycle and the subsequent dreaming, acting, living ones many times in our lives, and I guess this is time for yet another for me.

For one thing, I am not writing/meeting deadlines for anyone right now. I can't take notes, can't type well nor effortlessly (which makes it tedious and tiring), and had been having trouble buckling down to actually do stories anyway. So I asked a friend who is ripe and ready for this kind of challenge if she would like to take it over, and all the editors eagerly embraced the idea. It works for me, for her, and for them. Definitely the right thing to do.

But that leaves me without an identity I've had for some time -- not unwillingly, mind you, but still an adjustment, and with some loss to be dealt with.

I can just hear what Beck calls "everybody' chiming in with "geezeopete, Beth. It's not cancer, it's not a brain tumor, it's not a hip or worse. Get a grip!'

So shut up, critics. I know all this.

But I also think a change has been brewing for a while, and this event pushed me into it. Time to look at where I am now, what's important to me, what I *really* want to do now, how I get there, wherever it is.

This has made me feel my age more than I ever have. I have long known how fragile we are physically; this and a few other, hopefully minor, health issues that I'm getting checked out have made me more aware that we only get so much time here, and how do I want to use that?

One thing I know for sure: my husband is the light of my life and I am soooo grateful to have ther relationship that we do. It is a rare gift. I believe, and we both cherish it -- all the more because we spent a lot of years individually without it, not believing that we would ever be lucky enough to have it. I want time with him, as much as the Universe gives me, and I will do what I must to keep myself (reasonably) healthy and alive in order to have that.

As for the rest -- I'll figure it out eventually. The Universe aklways points me in a direction if I listen and look and stay open. Sometimes it is clear. This time it is not. I'm emotional at anything, I have flashes often of people and events from my life, and I'm trying to understand why and what I need to learn from that. I think of my parents at this age and wonder if they, too, tried to understand where they needed to go next.

Perhaps I'm overthinking -- and I have done that in the past. Perhaps I'm looking for signs that aren't there and won't be.

It is a time for re-evaluating what was and finding the path through what is to what's next.

PS I purchased Beck's book. I have not been paid to recommend it.