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Live Your Life…Live Your Life
As my son leaves for a service academy, I reflect on some advice from children’s author, Maurice Sendak
The past few months have marked a time of change in ways that have taken me by surprise and also some I knew were coming. My life isn’t much different in the bird’s eye view of the day to day, but the texture of my days and routines have shifted in ways significant to me.
I wrote in January about my longtime client, Annie, who died at 48-years old after two years dealing with and fighting a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis. After her death, I quickly signed up for a “retreat” with Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, who writes and teaches from Gampo Abbey in Canada. The class/retreat, titled, “The Sacred Journey: Living Purposefully and Dying Fearlessly,” was promoted within the week of Annie’s death and the confluence of those things spurred me to go ahead and take on the challenge of the six weeks of class and meditation that I really didn’t know if I had time for.
During those weeks, I woke every morning and barely wrote (my normal morning ritual), but signed into my online teaching and reading. Spending a couple hours, 5–7 days a week doing anything new creates an intensity — which I definitely felt.
And in a long-anticipated culmination of the college admissions process for my son - about halfway through my six week class, found out that he’d received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. This is the fruition of a his fervent hope since elementary school. And though it is his achievement and identity — in unexpected ways, I am also finding that it changes my life, and shapes my identity, too. I think I am only beginning to understand this.
From the time he received his appointment and he began to share that information with friends and family— and I began to share that information , too— it became clearer to me that being a military family is a significant identity. Moms (and Dads) who have witnessed and supported kids through the Academy and are at varying stages of those years are quick and ready to fill me in, let me know, and advise me. I need it.
There is tradition, there are written rules and regulations, there are unwritten norms, there is pomp and circumstance, and in…