Age. Less.

I'm sat here staring down the barrel of 46, vividly remembering the climb up this Hill of My Forties. What a slog. What trials and tribulations. What a climb. What a view. This is the top, over which I'm about to fall. Down towards those ages which start with five, only to rise again. Up and down and up and down we all go. Riding this seesaw they call life.

How we live!

Sometimes battered, sometimes shining.
Bruised and beaten one day, then singing to the sky of our glory the next.
How we live.
THIS is how we live.

Those well past 46 will say 'Pah! Child! Wait til you hear what I've lived!'
And I'd answer 'Tell me. Tell me all of it. This life, these days, so few and so full. So wide with possibility and so delicate to balance. Pull up a chair and tell me how you've done yours. And aren't we all so ridiculously lucky to be here!'

Most of the time I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And it all happens anyway. And I laugh my way through mistakes and triumphs, victories and defeats. The more I learn the less I need to know. The older I get, the more particular I become about who and what I let get in. Isn't it all magnificent?!

The beginnings and endings of my own experiences, then insert one husband and one child to make one family and those extra responsibilities piled on and we live in the tornado as a unit. We screech and roar and tumble around these days, sometimes fizzling out over the water and other times picking up houses and hurling them into the next county, screaming 'AIEEEEEEE!!!' And having each other's backs. And hearts. Always that, even when it's sometimes difficult to find, worse - to feel.

To all the days before and to come, I love you.
Even the hateful bits.
Even the drama.
Even the confusion and loss and unrealized expectations.
Even the lost dreams, because out of every darkness there comes light.

Brighter, always. But you do have to look for it.

Hard work, that.

Still, as I age, I only want to age less. I don't want any days to go having been unlived. Having been missed. We either succeed or we learn. The clock ticks through it all and we grab time in a bear hug and squeeze, eyes welling up sometimes as we watch it go.

Here atop Mount Forties, the slope below looks a bit nerve wracking. To see time before you and know the pace at which you will step forward to greet it, well that is something else altogether. In retrospect, all those previous decades didn't really tell me much aside from all that I didn't know.

One more week and my latest trip around the sun will end. It's been one hot ride.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!