Coin Flip
In the middle of life, dichotomy reigns. “This stage is awful and it’s awesome,” a friend so aptly stated, as he weaved his way through an ordinary day that was suddenly anything but. “The highs are high and the lows are low,” he matter-of-factly lamented. In almost everything he touched he could feel both sides of the coin.
Retrieved from https://aphablog.com/
Living does that after a while. It carves capacity within us. An ability to cup a good/bad thing in our hands—gently, without flinching-- while loving it and hating it in equal parts. These are “the best and worst of times” that the classic writer described. A carousel age of love and loss and what rides shotgun alongside of both. Days you wouldn’t trade a thing for —yet days you’d give about anything to have taken off your hands.
The space between the two is thinner than a sliver of the moon.
Our earliest days, it seems, are spent chasing what we want. We soar and we get sucker punched. We scratch and claw and dig. But, for the most part-- though we fly and fall—the experiences of youth happen in the middle span of the spectrum. We mostly can’t and do not touch the ends. Then in time we stretch. The days stack. We build the things we imagine, the life we crave, or at the least a life that we are proud to have, only to discover that everything comes with a timer. In a snap, we find ourselves hopscotching between the edges of paradise and purgatory. We love resolutely; ache in deep recesses that we didn’t know existed. Like a hot potato on a long, thin string we bounce from gratitude to grief, over and back again, knowing at once the excruciating wonder that bubbles under either side.
And it catches us unaware. This foray into the mid-life land. We don’t put on our blinker, carefully change lanes and take the exit ramp on purpose. We just look up one day and realize that we’re there, in this place where the tough and the tremendous are in cahoots together. Everything we love and live for is interleaved by difficult things.
I asked my friend who had recently lost his father, “What is the hardest part?”
“Knowing what to do next,” he said. “The grief physically drowns you. But then God sends these stones to step on ...” his voice mirroring his forward motion while dragging a heavy heart.
We talked about the gaping hole that no one, despite their best intentions, will be able to fill. We talked about mortality and how quickly it can morph from a pedestrian word to an ogre that stands in front of you boring a hole in your head. We talked about the time that he and his father shared in his last days, how they simultaneously scraped his soul and are yet his most treasured prize.
You don’t get one without the other, together we both surmised. Love creates the crater. The crater holds the love.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” —Charles Dickens