Moving on
There was a time in my life when I only had two CDs—The Garden State soundtrack and a CD of “moving on” songs that my sister made for me, and it was a hard time for me, but those two CDs, constantly playing, made me feel less lonely, more loved and more okay with just trying to get through it all just one song at a time. Riding trains with my little Discman, ( no IPOD yet), and I felt that although I couldn’t move too much right away, I was just getting ready to move on and move forward. And as Tom Petty would remind me as I listened, “It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going, what lies ahead I have no way of knowing.” Moving on is good, I know that. But, how, I always wonder, do I start to move on from something that I have loved so deeply?
The thought of all of New Orleans underwater is still almost too much to handle. The city that my loved ones have considered home for a hundred years, with all that soul and sound and passion and life, washed away, just like that. What gets me is all those houses and attics of photographs, holding the proof of who everyone was, and all those artifacts that had over the years accumulated to tell a story. My mother goes back and forth to New Orleans, with her sisters, still sorting through the last of the mud-caked relics of their childhood, trying to connect all the washed away pieces of what for so long, they knew as their truth, their identity, their family. It is a long, slow process of getting everyone back on their feet after a force like that comes and knocks you down. A legacy is lost. And in the end, we can be grateful that it is just stuff.
But it takes a lot more than a hurricane to crush a spirit, and in this situation, there is really no choice but to move on and New Orleans is doing just that. So they salvaged what they could, cleaned up the rest and started all over again. And isn’t that all we can be expected to do anyway? Just picking up the pieces and starting over? Moving on is the essence of what makes a life a story at all, because it is admitting to ourselves that there is something better out there waiting for us to claim it. We move on when we are scared, when we have learned our lessons, when we need a new place to fall in love with. We move on from the places we don’t quite fit in anymore. We move on when nothing is going right and when everything is. We move on when we need new people to inspire us, or when we grew all we could with the ones we stayed with for so long. We move on, painfully, dragging our feet the whole way, resisting every ounce of change and surrender that is being forced upon us. We move on gladly, thrilled to get out of where we are, with the opportunity to renew our lives.
Only hindsight is crystal clear, and with everything from the loss of a city and all it contains, to falling hard heart-first, to packing up your life and leaving it all behind, it is only when we are through it all that we can truly see what we would have done differently, done better. And in the meantime, we have to move forward, from the places we love, the people we love and that freedom we love, moving on to someplace that we know we might someday come to love just as much.
posted by Mary @ 9:57 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home