It’s not bad, it’s fantastic, actually - nothing like we thought when we were in our twenties. I went to Louisiana a couple of weekends ago for a benchmark birthday of one of my dearest friends. She’d crossed into a new decade, opened a new chapter of life and a group of us celebrated the night away in a palatial home on the Red River.
As we sat at the pool’s edge and looked out at the curve in the lazy river, several of us girls talked about the fact that growing older chronologically has somehow helped us grow younger, if wiser, in spirit. We talked about the actual lightness of spirit that comes from all the hard lessons of life and how we feel more free to enjoy life in general.
Somehow, now matter how much more flab we seem to gather on our older bones, if we allow the spirit grow lighter it seems to grow firmer and chronological changes don’t seem dreadful at all. It’s a choice, we decided; a choice that we want to make correctly. After all, hadn’t all the “wrong” choices been harder to deal with than the right ones? It’s not even hard now, most times, to go the right way because we chose to learn from those wrong turns that took us into dark places in our youth. (We’re still paying for some of those, but no longer with tears!)
My friend, Melissa, – the birthday girl - actually seems to grow more physically beautiful with each year. She makes physical beauty seem effortless, probably because for her it is, though she doesn’t think so. But I’ve been privileged to witness her grow into her spiritual beauty as well. We have travelled the road to growth together for many years and we are reaping the rewards.
As we celebrated the day of her physical birth at a magnificent home in a scenic setting it occurred to me that we had, indeed, learned to pull beauty to us in every way. Surrounded by family and friends who truly care magnifies the warmth of friendship and the full realization that we’re not such basket cases or these great people wouldn’t want to spend time around us, would they?
How long-suffering is the kind of love that comes with friendship? Pretty long suffering in mine and Melissa’s case. Without complaint she has seen me through many a tough time and helped me come out on the better end. When I was working (and living) on the road and feeling so lonely and far away I always knew if I ever needed her, she was only a phone call away.
I saw many at the party who knew the same thing of Melissa. A good number of them had come from out of town as I had to celebrate the birth of this treasured friend, this wonderful woman who has faced her lessons in life with remarkable determination.
And so like her, Melissa gave me a gift that night of her birthday celebration when she told a group of friends how much she and I had leaned on one another along this life’s journey and that we were, in fact, soul mates. Of course, we’d had a couple pretty stout martinis, but that was okay, too.
I can’t think of a more precious gift.
