Sasee Magazine

My cat has a present tense outlook on life. Everything is brand new, each day, each moment. In the morning, he goes outside with a joyful new-day leap, only to scratch to get in moments later. He runs to his bowl for a few bites, then meows to go out again, desperation in his voice. I open the door, and he bounds out as if he’s never been outside before.

He repeats this pattern, over and over, each trip outside as joyful as the last, interrupting our coffee, the newspaper, our bowls of cereal, until my husband, children and I look at each other, exasperated. “Will you get him this time?” we ask with a sigh. We joke about his lack of memory and attribute his behavior to head injuries sustained when he fell down the stairs as a kitten.

He drives us crazy, and yet I envy his everything-is-new approach to life.

I spend most of my days in the middle of things. I’m in the middle generation – between my parents and my children. I’m at mid-life, in the middle of my marriage, of raising my kids. Our house is neither old nor new; even our minivan has reached its likely half-life. It’s not a bad place to be – I treasure my 20 year marriage and my half-grown children. I like my minivan and my house, but some days I do tasks I’ve done over and over, and my rounds of errands and chores and laundry and chauffeuring and work seem old

I have new in my life – new hobbies, new people. But I miss the structure of beginnings and endings that were built into the rhythm of my life when I was younger. When I shop for school supplies with my children, I feel excited as we roam the aisles of our local Staples. I want the freshly sharpened pencils and clean new notebooks. I want the possibility of a perfectly organized pencil pouch. I remember the feeling I used to get at the end of a semester in college. My last exam done on a cold December afternoon, I walked down the steps of the classroom building into the dusky air. Lights blinked on in the dorms around me, and I felt light inside – the hard work of the semester behind, vacation and a new semester ahead.

Looking back on my life, however, I realize I haven’t always recognized beginnings. The day I met my husband dawned like any other. It was a middle-of-the-year-day in June, and I called a friend to invite her to my group house’s party. “Can I bring a friend?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, not knowing that when she arrived that night, she would bring my future husband through the alley gate.

I remember mundane details from that day. My roommate and I walked to the store for supplies and struggled home through city streets with too many bags of groceries. I can still see the summer sunlight through that house’s kitchen window and can picture the tile of the kitchen floor and the wrought iron stairs to the back yard. I see the grill where my husband-to-be helped cook chicken, and I remember the jokes and glances we exchanged. Today, my husband and I begin our story with that day, but as characters in the story, we didn’t know we were at a beginning.

I wonder how many beginnings walk by me every day. Do I miss opportunities looking at the world with my middle-of-life eyes?

We took my two-year old nephew to the zoo the other day. We strapped his car seat into our minivan and piled in. Each of us had our own thoughts as we pulled away from the house. For me, this was a well-traveled road – I’d taken many trips to the zoo with my children – and I thought about traffic and parking. My brother and sister-in-law probably wondered about my nephew’s nap schedule; my teenaged children may have been thinking of the other places they’d like to be. I turned around to back out of the driveway and caught my nephew’s eyes. For him, everything was new – traveling in the van, sitting near his cousins, going to the zoo. He squirmed in his car seat, his whole body grinning. He put his hands between his knees and scrunched his shoulders up to his ears. “This is fun!” he said. We hadn’t even left the driveway.

In midlife, I want to borrow some of my nephew’s joy. I want to look at the world with the wide eyes of my cat. I want to greet each day as full of possibility.

This week, I will go to choir rehearsal, as I have for over ten years, and when I walk into the choir room, I want to look at it in a new way. Instead of seeing what has always been the same, I want to look for new possibilities hidden in the old cinderblock walls. When we sit down to practice, I want to sing a new song. And I want to learn to sing an old song in a new way.