“There is a sadness in realizing that the person you have become is not the person you once wanted to be. It is the sadness of looking back on your life and seeing all the ways you have compromised, all the dreams you have let go, all the parts of yourself you have lost along the way. And in that sadness, there is a sense of mourning, not just for the life you could have had, but for the person you could have been.”

(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

4:00 a.m. and I have become intimate friends.  It’s the time the Universe has decided to jostle me from my slumber, however I may feel about cooperating, and rise from the comfort of my perfectly rumpled covers as the messages of the day start to download into my coffee-coveting brain.  As I listen to birds chirp the coming of daybreak from the darkness of my terrace, my mind races with potential and imaginary outcomes, from deciding whether to take that Zoom course at 2 p.m. to giving silent, rehearsed advice in my mind to the President-elect of the United States for his next cabinet pick.  Somewhere out in the heavens I imagine an eavesdropping alien intercepting the wireless signals from my brain and musing, “Wanna laugh? This chick thinks ‘Joe Schmoe’ would make a great Secretary of State, and that she’s going to finish that blank-paged chapter after a long lunch.”   

I have a catalog of reinforcement.  In recent years, I’ve been following a woman named Dr. Gladys McGarey on social media.  Dr. McGarey was a remarkable woman and physician who recently passed away after 103 years of brimming productivity on this earth.  She was one of those wise and peaceful souls with a blueprint for life etched onto her face and an impish grin that silently conveyed she knew things that only time would reveal.  Through her decades as a practicing physician under the mantle of “mother of holistic medicine,” and author of the book, “The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age,” she shared a wealth of wisdom on how to get through this advancing world with joy remaining in your heart. If I had to epitomize a favorite takeaway from Gladys, it would be these four words: Use your energy wildly.

Still, I wrestle with the spiritual notion that in more recent years has been referred to as “toxic positivity,” a concept that promises if we can only harness the canvas of our mind to correctly align with the manifesting center of our soul, we can create a bountiful reality filled with all of our hopes and dreams.  While I believe in the power of the mind to accelerate healing and bring forth our goals, and the power of prayer to intercede and protect, and I accept that words are alive with power, I don’t think life can so easily be condensed into one formula for success.  There are factors outside of our control that interfere with an envisioned destiny, much like the slightly inebriated stranger who cuts in on the dance floor just as you’re about to sway flawlessly with the rhythm.

Very few of us become the person we set out to be in our youth.  Life is simply too random, filled with too many rippling twists and turns and unexpected circumstances to remain on a programmed course.   At the core, if we’re fortunate, we can preserve the essence of who we are and with our best, navigate through that lens as the winds of fate and luck continue to blow. If we bend in the right direction, we can become a more surprising version of ourselves.