Trading in Trails for Open Oceans

Video Version Here

Last week, I wrote about an experience I had walking a labyrinth. This memory came to me while I was hiking a narrow, twisting trail. All I could do was follow the path.

My life’s path was a well laid-out one until recently. I was on a very prescribed path—high school, college, medical school, residency, physician-hood and parenthood. Not that I felt trapped on this path. It’s what I wanted, and my life was very rewarding.

Then the trail suddenly did a loop-de-loop, a hairpin turn that I didn’t see coming, and I got vertigo, and whiplash, from the sudden change in direction. The trajectory I thought that I was one veered, and it was nothing that I could have foreseen. My fifty year old husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

So I tried to map a new path into this dark forest. I wasn’t sure where I was going, and there wasn’t much in the way of trail markers to point me in the right direction.

I did the best that I could by researching, talking to people who had been on a similar path, and learning to just follow it wherever it led me.

I didn’t ask for help so much as I learned to accept it. This made the trail a little less bumpy, smoothing the way.

If I felt like I was floundering, stuck at a fork in the path, not knowing which way to go, I often turned to trusted friends and family for advice.

At times, a friend could see that I was headed in a wrong direction. Certain caregiving techniques no longer worked, or I was doing something that had an untoward affect on me or my family. The friend would call me out of the woods and back onto the path.

Well, I’ve taken this metaphor about as far as I can!

Since Harvey died two and a half years ago, and I retired one and a half years ago, I seem to be free of any straightforward track.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did publish my memoir and am more involved in social media than I ever thought that I would be. I have followed a well laid-out plan for all of that.

And the coronavirus certainly took us all out of our collective trajectories.

But that seems to be winding down, as does the hoopla and work surrounding my memoir.

Now what?

I was contemplating this question while on a friend’s pier at her lake house. She has a wide open view of the lake, the far shore is far indeed.

And I thought, “Maybe I’m not having to choose a certain path to take at this point. The whole expanse is ahead of me. I can choose to go anywhere!” (Figuratively, but maybe literally, too.)

I’ve enjoyed writing these weekly blog posts related to Alzheimer’s disease, but I seem to be pivoting toward more personal reflections rather than strictly informational posts. So I’ll keep that up, but maybe give myself permission to not necessarily post on a strict schedule.

I’m charting a new course on this expanse. I’ll see what wind catches my sails. Trading in trails for open oceans.