A long time ago I was lamenting to someone that my life did not seem to follow the trajectory that I thought everyone’s should. This covered, as they say, the sublime to the ridiculous - too early to marriage and too late to makeup. She laughed and said, not everyone goes from A to B to C to D. Some go from A to B to F to N and then to C. Or maybe skip C entirely.
As absurd as this may sound, I found it comforting. It made me realize that it was ok to follow my path, whatever that might be, and probably allowed me to say it was ok to walk across Spain at age 62 and join the Peace Corps at 63. If I had been constrained by what I thought things should be or what I should be doing I probably would not have taken those leaps of faith. Sometimes it helps to not realize you are leaping across what others may see as a chasm and you see as solid ground.
Maybe there is a reason that I am doing estate planning and probate. Those are seemingly boring areas, but I find them thought provoking and full of stories. My clients’ lives are varied. Some have gone from A to B to C to D, but most are like me, all over the alphabet. My guess is that if I had more in-depth conversations, I would find most have traveled to M, or maybe even Z, before they went back to B or C, perhaps skipping A entirely.
I was thinking about this A B C article today, when I came across a word I had never seen or heard before - abecedarian. Webster’s says that it means “of or relating to the alphabet” or “alphabetically arranged” and that “In its oldest documented English uses in the early 1600s, abecedarian was a noun meaning “one learning the rudiments of something”... "
Guess my friend had it right. I was and still am learning the rudiments of something. Everything and every day and in any order that makes sense to me.
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