who are we anyway?

today i was in the tub soaking because yesterday i played thanksgiving day american football and got slammed by a 20 year old guy.  so i was soaking and thinking that i am old.  i was soaking and because it was my neck that hurt, i was under the water and i could hear it rushing from the faucet as the tub filled.  i closed my eyes and i listened and wondered who i am anyway.  i listened to the sound of the world underwater and remembered being in my tub in atlanta 3 years ago- listening to the same sounds underwater in that now far away tub.  i remembered the light from the windows of that upstairs bathroom, and the color of the candles and the rim of soot from the candles on the shelf above, and the scent of the bath salts.  i remembered the feeling of my feet on the cool metal 'hot' and 'cold' knobs when my head is under the water.  i remembered wondering who i was anyway.

it's funny how you can ask that same question whether you are living in a shi-shi neighborhood in a major metropolitan american city, or in the heart of africa with a dead black mamba outside your bathroom window. i am still me.  you are still you. other worlds or lands or across oceans - we are always with ourselves.

this summer when i was home visiting in america, my friend and i were comparing the similarities of our lives.  we'd both moved two years earlier.  we'd left each other. we'd left familiar and easy and affordable.  we'd left jobs and known and security and we'd embraced- new, unknown, and beginning.  she'd moved to marin county in northern california and i'd moved to east africa.  we both were, unavoidably in the middle of our lives, basically starting over, finding new friends and schools and jobs and grocery stores and banks and even though marin county and mukono uganda- could literally not be further apart or more different- we are both asking the same question- who are we anyway?

maybe this is what the 40's is all about.  maybe this is what the middle of life is- it's the asking and the re-asking....but i didn't expect this. 

i expected settled.  i expected known- as in- knowing myself.  i expected (actually much earlier- like by 30) to have it pretty much figured out, but why?  and how boring that would be.  i guess because we grow up with this idea that we should figure it out.  that it's about arriving somewhere.  that life is some achievable goal. that our finitude is controllable - mastered even if we set out and do what we set out to do.  

the thing about life is that it keeps happening.  it keeps changing and so do we.  i think we have the wrong interrogative pronouns.  what do you want to be when you grow up?  should be who do you want to be- and continue to be- and further grow into- because do we ever grow up? where do you want to live? should be how do you want to live? or try to live? and are you willing and able to bend those things as life happens. 

the advantage of getting older is that you see more and more how hard it all is, and how unfixed and unplanned things really are.  that things go terribly wrong and terribly right when we are least expecting it.  that life is a mist. that really there is a lot we don't know- and that's even true for people who are still pretending they do know. 

the advantage to getting older is that we can look around from where ever we are, and tread a bit lighter and be a bit more gentle with ourselves and each other.  we can try, as we wonder again who we are, to be okay with the asking.  we can teach our children that who and how we are to be and live is more important perhaps than what and where.  and we can share in this, we can be alive in the asking, in the discovery, in the ongoing process- from whatever tub we soak in.