It's Waiting for you

Possibility is just around the corner

Waiting for You

Twenty years ago, I stood ankle-deep in the Gulf of Mexico staring at a beach that wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.

A hurricane had come through years before and destroyed much of the coastline. By the time I arrived, the cleanup was finished. The sand stretched for miles. The water was calm. The clouds looked like they had been painted by someone showing off.

I took a photograph. Later that day I returned to my art studio and began turning it into a painting. I called it Waiting for You.

At the time, I thought the beach was waiting for tourists.

Now I’m I know differntly.

Yesterday, Google Photos served that painting back to me — one of those little “Remember this?” reminders that arrives uninvited and usually annoying. Not this time. It triggered a memory- -nay a feeling.

I remembered more than the painting.

I remembered the day. My friend David and I had no agenda, no destination, no reason to be there. We drove around. We fished. We wandered. We followed curiosity wherever it pointed. It was one of the best days of my life.

What surprised me wasn’t the memory.

It was the realization that I haven’t had many days like that in twenty years.

Somewhere along the way I became very good at building a life — at surviving, creating, working, producing, keeping everything moving forward. All necessary. All real. But play quietly slipped out the back door while I wasn’t looking. And I didn’t notice it was gone until a twenty-year-old photograph appeared on my phone on an late Tuesday evening.

A few hours before google photos triggered my memory, a woman in our Tuesday gathering shared her expeirence from walking two miles in a forest.

After overcoming a couple of health conditions that depleted her energy as well as her imagination for her own life she chose - life on a whim - to drive to a local state park- and walked a trail she hadn’t been on in years. Two miles at most. Nothing difficult.

But somewhere on that trail something happened that she hadn’t expected and couldn’t entirely explain. The majesty of it, she said. The quiet. The way the woods just — held her. She came back feeling soothed in a way she hadn’t felt in years. And curious. Genuinely, actively curious — two things that had quietly gone missing somewhere in the business of surviving her own life.

She didn’t go looking for a revelation. She went for a walk.

And something that had been waiting a long time finally got the chance to come back.

Notice the utility poles in the painting. The hurricane stripped them bare and I left them there — because the beach didn’t erase what had happened. It just kept being beautiful anyway. The damage stayed. The beauty returned.

Maybe that’s what waiting looks like. Not the absence of what was lost. Just life, continuing quietly, holding space for the moment we’re ready to step back into it.

A beach after a storm.

A trail through the woods on a Tuesday afternoon.

A painting that reappears twenty years later and asks: what did you forget that is still waiting for you?

I don’t think possibility disappears. I think it waits — patient and unhurried — for the day we stop being reluctant about observing our own lives in retirement and remember there might be something interesting around the next corner.

The beach was waiting the day I stood ankle-deep in the Gulf with a camera and no agenda.

I think it’s still waiting now.

The question is whether we’re ready to wander back toward it.

What has been waiting for you?

If something in this piece stirred something quiet in you — a memory, a longing, a thing you set down so long ago you almost forgot it was yours — I’d love for you to bring it to our next Tuesday Zoom gathering.

Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom. No agenda. No efficiency. Just women wandering back toward the parts of themselves that have been patiently waiting. It’s often declared as “ my most favorite part of the week” by particpatns who know they have a place to anticipate, to enjoy and to explore all without judgement nor a guru teaching with a white board.

PS - Remember tonight (June 3) Mike and I will go live on Substack with our new podcast talking about the variety of issues, concerns and possibilities of retirement.

Also I whipped up a little short video about the predictament of the word future as it apply to retirement life. See it on Youtube: