Beyond 55: Lessons On How Not To Leave Yourself By Christianne Asper-Contant

In the distance, I hear some hammering and shoveling.

A little closer, birds chirping.

Closer yet, the wind is touching the leaves.

While my ears soak in the contrasting symphony, my skin yields to a long-awaited 70-degree day after frost that was still here just recently.

And just as I imagined it would, during our long, cold winter, my eyes are now delighting in nature’s greenery all around. Soon, the little fawns will be running through here again, practicing their tiny strides in circles the way they do every late spring.

They’re not here right now. But I know they’re coming.

And feeling all of this aliveness around me…

I find myself wanting to write a little heart note to you.

You know…

from a surprisingly young age, I held this unusual sense… that as I grew older, life would somehow become closer. More inhabited.

And now, as I soak in this last day of being 55… I get to validate that intuition.

To be clear, this was not a direct line.

There were seasons when I became more distant from myself as I grew older. Moving so quickly, I no longer noticed what was happening within me.

Putting so much energy into holding everything together… that something as essential as rest slowly began to feel like an unaffordable luxury.

I remember noticing one day just how many massage gift certificates had piled up in a drawer… little offerings of care from people around me… and somehow, I still couldn’t make the time to receive them.

And those odd moments when nature’s beauty could surround me

… meaningful people… and still feel strangely far from my own life.

As though I was always preparing to arrive somewhere… 

instead of fully inhabiting where I already was.

And over the more recent decade… wait a minute… decades now.

I’ve become much quicker at noticing when I begin disappearing from my own life again.

And now, instead of fighting it, there’s more of a quiet recognition.

An inner: ‘ahhh… hello, old messenger.’

Most often, it happens in very ordinary ways.

Reaching for my phone the moment something uncomfortable gets touched inside. Distracting myself before a feeling has a chance to land.

A little drifting away with every distraction.

Not all at once. Little shifts here and there.

And I think the walk back to ourselves happens that way, too.

For me, it’s probably been a thousand little moments… when life started feeling more alive from the inside.

The smell of honeysuckle.

A meaningful conversation.

Feet on the grass.

The feeling of life actually landing.

And perhaps, as you sit with your own life for a moment…

What now feels more intimate than it once did?

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