The Shift

This is it – the shift away, the shift forward, the moving ground neutral in its peril of tipping you into this new gorge where you have no place, no role, except to be in that crack. Too far down to get out, but not so far down that you can’t see where you could have maneuvered, if during the shift you had caught yourself and done differently, seen more clearly, or prepared yourself better.

The shift is clear when they are talking with a friend in front of a TV, two worlds with the walls up – peer group and pubescent choice in front of the cultural medium. They wait for you to leave; not out of spite, but out of a collective decision that you are not needed in the room, nor wanted. It is time for you to go, as gracefully and as non-destructively as possible. Your feelings aren’t considered – your place is, and it is not in the midst of them anymore.

It doesn’t mean they don’t love you, or don’t respect you. They don’t now understand you, where you fit, where the rules you still author and enforce leave them room for childlike vulnerability, simple trust, and easy conversation. There is freight in the shift. The freight of time passed and lives lived and words spoken and feelings evolved and ideas enlarged and scales falling from eyes all around.

The place you choose when the shift begins is tricky. It is always tricky to keep your balance when the world is moving under your feet. But this world is one you created, this world is one you made and inhabited and, yes, ruled, benignly and with love and your best wisdom. But you were in charge and now your charges are moving, shifting, and changed. Now your true charge is to live with utter grace in the midst of the collapse of your world.

A flash this morning as they race out the door - children growing up and individuating and requiring and wanting less of you, (albeit more slowly less of your time as driver, lunch-maker, facilitator . . .). This is like being laid off from that job with the company you’ve given your whole career to. This is what many men must feel like when they retire – redundant. I’ve pontificated about men and how they define themselves by their jobs, and how when they don’t have them any more, they become the countless and discounted bumps on the proverbial log. What are they for, but maybe to be burls or knots or even sappy blisters on that cut limb or trunk lying on the ground? This is a sad and damning image - tree wrack, no longer part of the living forest. This is like that camp song we sang so gleefully together in younger, simpler summers, where you sing about the diminishing nature of things – the bird on the nest, the wing on the bird, the feather on the wing, the flea on the feather. . . . This feels humbling and familiar now.

This morning I can see the things I’ve done this week in the snow that I’ve shoveled that has frozen hard in a sharp immutable palisade in front of the garage; the vacuumed rug; the dishes in the sink from the meal that I cooked; the sheets on the bed that I made after the wash I did. Down the hall are the girls’ rooms – evacuated in the morning school rush, covers thrown back, clothes on the floor, the faint smell of teenage girls experimenting with perfumes and body lotions and dreams of being women. I leave their shades down because they won’t be back during this daylight.

There is the ache somewhere in the middle of me, the thickness in my eyes that I feel after I’ve been crying, though I haven’t cried yet this morning. A watchword pulses in my temple as I reckon with today’s tremor - relevance.