Gobsmacked!

Going back to work at a full time job while keeping the part-time job and other fun and interesting life activities (!) has had me going for the past couple of weeks but I'm beginning to find my sea legs again and get my bearings about me. For the record, I LOVE my new job working with older folks at the nursing home. I'm on one of the rehab units and mostly work with folks who have had surgeries or other hospital stays and need to get some strength and mobility back so they can go home. I see them when they come in, assess their psycho/social needs, work with their families and then arrange for them to have all the goods and services they need in place when they go home. It's fast paced and fraught with all manner of surprises and other variables but I am really beginning to enjoy it now that I'm getting the hang of it just a little bit.

So I told you all of that to tell you this; I grew up in a neighborhood just across the river from a very wealthy and prominent old money neighborhood. I went to school with the kids from that neighborhood and am still good friends with a lot of them today. I have seen lots of the movers and shakers out in the community all of my life and I must admit for a lot of my life I admired them for their successes and their standing in society (I've pretty much grown out of that and am quite content with my life overall these days even though I'm not what you would call successful in a worldly sense). Today, I was walking down a hall and I saw a woman I recognized by face if not by name who had been one of the society ladies I had seen in the paper at balls and fund raisers and in Publix in her tennis skirt chatting with friends in the produce section. But here she was, small and anxious in a reclining rolling chair, unable to communicate and seemingly unable to understand and it hit me like a ton of bricks. All the things we chase after and argue about and hold dear to our hearts all of our lives and for what? In the end what have we got left that we can hold on to? Our status, our accomplishments, our acquisitions.... none of it matters much by that point. And it can all disappear in a heartbeat. All I can do is to pray that she and all the folks I get to interact with are able to become more and more grounded on the spiritual side even as they begin to lose their groundedness on the physical side. And I pray that the transition brings with it peace and joyful expectation. And my prayer for myself is that I will remember getting gobsmacked with that realization and continue to loosen my grip on those things that I'll just be leaving behind anyhow. You can't reach out to take hold of the new stuff if you won't let go of the old.