The difference between living and really living...

Thanks for the comments on my Prodigal brother post, I'll respond to
them (and comment on your blogs) when I can get online from home.

I'm really busy at work. I thought things would slow down this time of
year, but it appears to be speeding up. I can't wait until January -
it's the best month of the year. Everyone's away, it's Sydney Festival
time, work is ultra quiet, the beaches are beckoning...

Meanwhile, I have much to do before Christmas.

I had lunch with a good friend today. We were talking about all the
crap that seems to happen all the time to us these days and we found
ourselves reminising about how nice it was to be younger with less
worries, less commitments, less responsibilities.

The most frustruating thing is that we didn't truly realise how nice
it was to have that piece of mind back then. Sure, there was study and
boys and relationships to worry about. Sure, we did have some level of
stress in our lives. But it's nothing like now. Life was a party.

Maybe it's because we're approaching 30, maybe it's because we can
only see life getting more and more complicated in the next five
years, maybe it's just the build up of a very difficult year - for
both of us. We've both dealt with sickness (me with my husband, she
with her dying father-in-law), we both moved house, started a new job,
submitted a PhD and have continuing financial pressures - it's one
thing after another. Gaaaah!!

Sometimes it just makes you want to get down on your knees and pray
for some quiet time.

Some time with nothing to worry about.

Anyway, in the last week, we've both had someone we love die.

For me, it was a grand aunt, for her, it was a family friend.
(Incidently, I'll never forget Aunty Grace. She was clearly insane and
totally outrageous. She was sex-obsessed, even in her 80s, and would
think nothing of commenting on how our boobs were growing and grabbing
at them - very embarrassing when we were teens - flashing her own at
every chance, and collecting figurines with large penises which she
used to embarrass guests every chance she had. She was funny. And her
husband was clearly still utterly in love with her after 60 years of
marriage. So rest in peace, Aunty Grace. But I digress...)

Death is something that is becoming more and more of an issue.
Especially for our parents. Mum and Dad are in their late 50s and I
remember when they both turned 50 and how I thought at the time that
even though they weren't old, that's when bad health things really
start happening. And now, not many years later, they just seem to be
getting more, I dunno, frail, I suppose.

I think it must be frustrating because they're not old and their minds
are as sharp as anything, but more things go wrong with the body at
their age and it must really get to them. Mum had a knee operation a
few weeks ago, Dad had a hand operation last year, Mum had a
hysterectomy a few years ago, Dad had an ankle operation. The hospital
becomes more and more a familiar place.

And shit starts to happen with their friends. And I have friends whose
parents are dying. And it's scary - it's like they're not elderly (not
like Aunty Grace), but they're stepping aboard that slope where things
start to get worse and worse.

So their kids, us, worry about them more and more. We want to help,
but at the same time, we're also struggling with our own new problems.

We worry about the stuff in our own lives - our marriages, our houses,
our jobs. Some of my friends also have kids - and that's something I
don't even think I can deal with right now.

I keep hoping that 2007 will bring some relief.
That in six months time I'll feel the same sense of having the world
at my feet as I did as a 25 year old.
But that gap of two years has been the biggest of my life.

So hoping that 2007 will suddenly become stress-free is like hoping
that I can leave my life and go off to some other place, thinking all
my problems will be gone when I come back.

But it's not like that at all.

And, over time, things just get more and more difficult and more and
more things go wrong. I suppose that's what life experience is all
about. It's not about hoping all my problems would go away, it's about
learning to deal with them.

It's also about realising that in my less-than-three-years marriage,
I've dealt with the good times and the bad, the sickness and the
health, the richer and the poorer and - THAT'S JUST THE START OF IT!
There's still more and more of it to go.

That's scary. But it's something I can't hide from. It's something
that's not going to pass in the new year.

Because this is a different me now.

I'm not the same person I was when I first starting blogging in 2004,
that girl couldn't even deal with all this shit - who had no idea what
was going to happen to her. This woman who I am now, she's not naive
enough to think that 2007 will be any easier than the struggle of
2006, because she knows that life doesn't work like that. It's not a
book or movie where things just work out in the end. Where bad things
happen but it's okay because it'll all work out in the final
resolution scene at the end.

No.

Life is a continuous struggle. Every single day *should* be a
struggle. It's supposed to be that way. And guess what? Struggling
isn't bad - it means that you're putting in effort, trying, working at
it. That's the real part of life. That's the guts of it all.

Coasting along on a stress-free dream isn't really living.
It's *not* the ideal that I should strive to achieve.
It's not what I should hope for in 2007.

And it's taken me a long time to realise that.