Sometimes we have to let go of the life we think we have in order to embrace the life really offered us. It’s like diving for shells on the ocean floor and then realizing that rocking in the warmth of the ocean itself is the real prize.

Loss, change, happenstance – these wash away those things we first thought our living on the earth to be and carry us kicking into the full flow of whatever our life really has to teach.

For my part, divorce brought with it the challenge of discovering my real gifts and direction. A grown daughter and grandchildren moving away brought time and reason to find within myself another focus. A grown son close-by brings opportunity for a mother and son’s adult encounter. Each of these carve space in me, making room for life’s sweet teaching to hold all things loosely.

For another, it may be the loss of a dream. A middle-aged woman grieves for the child she will never bear, never hold, never name. She surrenders to the gift in her of mothering in other, more universal ways. A man grieves for the success or a specific goal he will never achieve. He opens himself to relational possibilities that career demands could never offer. This, too, is learning not to cling to maps and messages not meant for one’s particular path.

It’s as if some master craftsman has all along been stripping away layers of pre-conditioned notions of what life is until we can bask in the naked truth that life just is. Life is not for storing up in barns, Jesus said, or for overdosing on endless desires, Buddha taught. Life is now and precious and full of tangled treasures.

The only constant in life for me has been nature herself, God’s hand brushing across the horizon in strokes of color that sprinkle sunrise and sunset across my day. My pre-dawn walk, the evening quiet with its cycles of moonlight, the play of animals – these ground me. People move in and out of my life. Years whittle away what expectations I may have harbored in younger days.

Rather than less, I am filled with more: inner peace, tranquility of soul, the realization and clarity of what really matters in my life. Whatever the day offers is prize enough. When something doesn’t happen as I might expect, I look to see what the universe has planned for me that day. It points me in directions I may not have looked for the gold I find there.

As I allow the rhythms of nature to pulse my being, I find it easier to allow others to be on their path without my need to control the outcome. If others do not behave or respond in ways I think best or healthy, I know there is a teacher wiser than I to guide them in the journey seeking them.

This leaves me available to focus on my own soul adventure. The sound of the bird’s song becomes more sweet, music, more pure, touch, more precious. In the words of Pat and Tom Malone, “I am more able to live as myself in my world as it is, to live in my relationships with other people as they are, to live where I am, with whom I am, doing what we are doing together, while we are doing it.”

Life opens wide and lays before me a banquet I did not know was mine while I was so focused on what I thought my life was supposed to be about. Perhaps that’s what loss and change and happenstance bring – the opportunity to claim what was truly authentic about ourselves before we took on the roles and tasks that captured our energy.

I didn’t know in my twenties who I would be in my fifties. I thought I would marry, have children, and that would be my life.

Life is long, and lovely, and as wide as the sky.