God gives you the people you need when you need them. When they leave, you feel like you still need them, but you start to walk on your own – eventually – and realize it was long past time to be your own momentum.
It takes a lot of telling your story to even make sense of it. So a sense of destiny is important. Then you internalize that, and move into the wide place of enjoyment of life, not desperately clawing now for relevance or a trajectory, but peaceably able to comprehend things like calm and joy. To approach them and see them compatible with your calling, not suffocating it like they used to. What fun!
The title is something my sister said – someone who has tried for the opposite of a Hero’s Journey, who has passionately vied for a chance to be soft. She astounds me. How creativity flows when unhurried by the seeming-deadline of fleeting identity. Getting up to speed, or more accurately, altitude, has taken every bit of necessary effort, but there’s a reason it’s called ‘cruising speed’. Once you get there, you stay there, navigate around turbulence when necessary, go through it when it’s unavoidable. But it’s much simpler to maintain altitude than achieve it.
I like hindsight. Things get clear. And the very idea of hindsight implies you’re now beyond the thing you’re looking at, not swallowed under it like you were. Like you finally got on the horse after years of getting bucked off. That’s what it felt like getting out of my twenties, like I remembered to tighten the girth and the saddle stayed on this time. Now you just ride.