The Origami of Time

I woke up with a familiar feeling from a long time ago– a small house I used to live in with my sister where we always slept with the windows open and woke up late. A different time entirely and yet the feeling was unmistakable. Like I’d fallen asleep here and woken up there: the glass door in my bedroom open, dappled light on the trees, and the sound of the water down below. Or maybe I was there, and I was waking up here.

I’ve become convinced lately in the origami qualities of time. How here is there and there is here. I look at a picture of my mother when she was just a few years older than me now, wearing a skirt I wore yesterday, and life feels very quick. She hasn’t left the house in weeks now, months even. We bring her flowers and cookies and new books and her joy reminds me of a child I don’t yet have, and how good it feels to take care of other people.

My fear of life moving forward is reduced to ash. What a blessing to grow older. To love and lose and move on and live in different states, and have good enough things that it hurts to give them up. What a blessing to miss a part of your life, what a good life.

I have been so paralyzed by not wanting to lose anything, or change, or give up or move on, that I had frozen myself, hung upside-down for years. I was unable to enjoy what I had and unable to let go of what I once enjoyed. Suffocating under the weight of my own guilt and indecision, or even worse the decisions I did make but could never find peace with.

It all feels like such waste of good time and youth and beauty and health and freedom and love and peace and all of the good things I have. There is no sense in not allowing yourself to enjoy the life you have in front of you. There is no sense in not making peace with your ghosts, and letting the things you didn’t do, lay to rest like the dead. There is no sense in not sleeping in late, and enjoying the way it feels to wake up naturally and forget where you are. There is no sense in it.

We hold tight to our narratives because these stories tell us who we are, but if we hold too tightly there is no room for a story to happen and tell us who we are next. These ideas feel like tiny revolutions for me. Permission to be happy again, to be open to what comes next, and to allow life to surprise me again. There is a lot of grace in letting go.

Because if time folds and bends, and we all circle back in the end. If we are always with one another and nothing is ever really lost. If we are here and there and all at once, then what else is there?

We are still here. We are always still here.

image by Megan Stewart