Month: March 2008

I don’t normally share my fiction on MamaBlogga, but today I’ll make an exception. I’m taking a free course in writing fiction just for fun. I did an activity today which asked me to make a character who thought and felt like I do but was different from me in some major way—big age difference, opposite gender or something like that. I’ve been thinking about being satisfied with the stage of life I’m in now and here is what I came up with:

The next stage of life

She was ready, she thought, to move on. Though she didn’t really know what the future would hold—and who of us can say that they do?—she had a reasonably good suspicion of the future that would await her.

And it would have to be better than this. This body that just couldn’t do what it used to. It didn’t even do what she wanted anymore. It was incapable of the simplest tasks. She had spent years caring for others—her children, her husband, her friends—with these hands and these legs and this mind, but now she couldn’t even take care of herself.

Would she miss her body? A body was supposed to be a blessing. It was supposed to be something that enabled you to do more than a spirit alone could. But now her body was more like a trap; a cage for her spirit.

If she could get to a mirror, she could see her unkempt, wiry white hair, her deeply wrinkled face, her stooped posture. How had she come to this? Surely this was not what life was supposed to give her. Surely this was not what God intended.

And yet she knew it was. Aging was a natural—vital, even—part of life. Sometimes, in weaker moments, she thought that the real reason behind growing old was to make you ready to leave this life by making you hate what was left of it.

Surely she would appreciate the next life more. Surely she wouldn’t miss anything about this phase of her life.

In her weaker moments, she worried that her lack of contentment in this difficult phase of her life would plague her in the next.

That was the only thing that she feared in death.

I wonder if that’s how I’ll feel at the end of my life if I haven’t learned to be satisfied with my season in life by then. Every season has its drawbacks and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. How can we learn to focus on our own grass and notice its beauty, rather than dreaming about the grass we’ll grow next year or the sod we hope to buy soon?