Permission

For most of my life, I believed freedom would arrive eventually.

After the children were raised.

After the career was established.

After the bills were paid.

After the house was settled.

I'm forty-eight years old and I'm beginning to suspect eventually is a dangerous place to store life.

I'm finding myself at 1am after a flight home, having just left the man I love, restless and writing—like Bukowski, like Kerouac, like writers have always done—wondering what's next.

Wondering why.

Wondering where I go from here.

Wondering what will fulfill me before I die.

Wondering where I fit. And with whom.

And another question arrives:

What if belonging isn't the same thing as being chosen?

Again—

What do I want?

I recently spent a morning in the mountains reading.

Not because I need to learn something for work or self reflection. Not skimming between emails or squeezing a chapter between obligations.

Just reading.

I finished Kerouac's Tristessa, a book filled with people living among poverty, addiction, longing , and impermanence. When I closed it, the mountains were waiting outside.

So I wrote.

And then I explored.

Read. Write. Explore.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple.

But somewhere during this morning, I recognized something.

This is how I wanted to live life since I was a child.

Before careers and marriage and mortgages.

Before motherhood.

Before calendars became crowded with obligations and other people's needs.

 Before productivity became confused with worth.

There was a girl who wanted books and words and places she hadn't seen yet.

I don't regret the life that got me here. The choices I've made gave me people I love and experiences I wouldn't surrender.

But life can be loved without being the only life we are allowed to choose.

And lately I found myself wondering:

When does life finally slow down enough for me to enjoy it?

Tonight another question occurred to me.

What if it doesn't?

What if life will always be another deadline?

Another bill?

Another person needing something.

Another piece of garbage someone forgot to take out.

Another fucking airport.

Perhaps waiting for life to slow down is simply another way of waiting for permission.

And I don't want to wait anymore.

Not because I want life without responsibility.

Because I want life with authorship.

I want morning books.

I want afternoons lost inside sentences.

I want to walk through cities where I don't know the streets.

I want mountains.

I want cafés.

I want conversations that make me forget what time it is.

I want love—enormous, ridiculous, complicated love—but I don't want love to require abandoning the woman doing the loving.

I want to wake up sometimes without anyone else's agenda waiting for me.

I want ordinary Tuesdays that feel like me.

Maybe that sounds selfish.

I've spent enough years worrying about that word.

At forty-eight, I'm beginning to understand there is difference between selfishness and sovereignty.

Selfishness says no one else matters.

Sovereignty says:

I matter too.

The people I love will still matter.

Responsibility will still exist.

There will still be storms. There will be people aboard my ship whom I would cross oceans for.

But loving them doesn't require me handing them my chart.

Because there is something sobering about realizing the horizon isn't infinite.

There are books I haven't read.

Places I haven't wandered.

Things I haven't written.

Versions of myself I haven't met.

And there are only so many mornings.  I cannot recover the ones already spent.

But I can stop treating the ones ahead of me as though they are guaranteed.

For most of my life, I thought freedom was somewhere in the distance.

Maybe freedom isn't a destination at all.

Maybe it is the moment a women finally places her hands on the helm and understands:

No one is coming to give her permission.

She was the captain all along.