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Beanie Blog #13 October 2022 The Urgency of Life (from an old soul)
I have always known that I am an old soul. Even as a kid, I always had a deeper understanding of things than my peers. I knew things I couldn’t explain, such as the feeling of deep grief without having experienced any significant losses. I felt things on a deeper level than most of my peers, and that is when I discovered that I am also an empath. When someone I care about is hurting, I feel their pain. I carry it too. This is not easy to carry throughout life, but I think it made me a better person overall. As a child, when I was about nine or ten, I remember riding my bike home from a friend’s house, and for some reason, I kept thinking about all the milestones I still had ahead of me to look forward to—such as graduation, marriage, motherhood, career—and it filled me with a sense of satisfaction that I still had plenty of time for life—that my whole life was ahead of me. Despite that, life for me always had an urgency. Now, at age 69, those milestones are all behind me—I’m a mother, and a grandmother, have been married twice, and am retired from my day job. I don’t call it a career because I did it to pay the bills, but it was not my chosen career path. I have always wanted to be a writer since I was a child. I wrote stories and books and kept them lovingly in a journal. But life happened. I got busy being a wife, soccer mom, working mother, doting grandmother, etc. It wasn’t until I retired from the workforce that I had time to devote to my writing. Nowadays, I spend most of my time doing what I love, and yet life still holds an urgency for me. Not because of my age but because I am more aware of the fragility of life. My sister's death brought home the reality of life and death. One minute she was here, and the next minute she was gone. When I flew out to Colorado for her funeral and stayed in her house, I was haunted by her slippers still sitting by the back door. Her purse was still hanging over the back of the chair in the kitchen. Her things were everywhere—but she was not there. She died at age 56, and she had plans for her future. Petra always lived her life with even more urgency than I did, and I think that maybe somehow she knew she didn’t have much time. At this stage of my life, which I like to call Act 3 in a 4 Act play, every day that I wake up brings new appreciation for life. And new urgency. There are still a million things I want to do and places I want to go. But not just the milestones matter—even the everyday, mundane, normal days have urgency—because each day matters and is a blessing. I know this and honor it. So, now as I ride my bike through life, I don’t look forward to all the milestones but remember them all with joy (yes, even the painful ones) because they all made me who I am today. However, I look ahead to what still waits for me, and the urgency to make each day count has new meaning and purpose. No matter your age, live your life with urgency—and I don’t mean be in a hurry—I mean, savor each day no matter what it brings and know that it is just one day in the puzzle of life that contains thousands of pieces. Yet, without all the pieces, the puzzle is not finished—therefore, each day matters as much as the next. Always be kind. The world needs more of that, Love Always, Sabina (Beanie) Boston
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