just an atom in the beaker of life

One of the things about turning 50 is the fact that you cannot go back and start over.  You are literally running out of time.  When I look back on these previous decades I realize that nearly every decision from young adulthood until now was the wrong one.  And now, it is too late.  There are some things that simply are not do-overs.  The problem with reaching this conclusion is that I am unsure how to proceed with "the rest" of my life.  Keep plodding along until one day is simply my last?  I guess so.  I can't think of anything else to do.  I am just too tired to make sweeping changes.  I don't want to rock every boat that I currently am balancing one foot on.  I have used up most of my gung-ho-change-the-world unlimited energy.  And how?  By putting my nose to the grindstone.  Pretty much THE exact thing I did not want to waste my life on.  Yet somehow that is exactly what I did.

What would I have done differently?  Pretty much all of it--marriage, career, college, location, all those biggies.  In fact, I have done do-overs on most of these and still have somehow made the wrong choices.  Maybe what this means is that it is not the choices  we make, or the things we do, or the people we encounter that help make us happy people.  Maybe it is just us.  Just us.  Ultimately we each are in charge of ourselves and our happiness and all the other variables are simply extra, something swirling around us, somtimes connected to us, sometimes breaking away, sometimes reconnecting in a different sense.  Rather like atoms in a scientific experiment.  Add a little heat, stir in a solution, and some atoms change, some mutate, some break away and create new molecules. 

So I continue to tread water, going nowhere, expending all my energy simply to stay afloat.  I am an atom being stirred in the solution of life, but somehow have lost whatever property allows me to adhere to other atoms to create a new element.  The giant spoon is stirring and stirring and the bunsen burner is heating and heating and pretty soon I will just rise to the surface of the beaker and be released as steam. 

Still keeping a grip, Deb