Becoming

I am in a season of becoming. John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” In a similar manner, becoming often happens while we’re not looking.

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It’s an uncomfortable journey. I notice the gradual discomfort of being in my own skin, how it starts to no longer fit quite right. I feel the stuttering of rhythms that no longer flow as easily as they once did. I feel the grinding of the gears and cogs of life and work snagging on each other and tripping me up in ways they never used to.

My natural tendency is to focus on the discomfort, to busy myself with repairs, attempting to return life to working and fitting the way it used to, never realizing that it doesn’t work or fit right because I am becoming more.

But unseen moment by unseen moment I do become, until one day I look in the mirror and realize all of a sudden that I already am, and I wonder when and how that happened.

/ /

I missed out on too much of me and my becoming over the past forty years. Some of it I missed because I was simply trying to survive. Much of it, though, was arrested entirely, not on purpose, but as the collateral damage of abuse and neglect.

Today I feel the discomfort, the grinding and grating, the tripping over myself in all the doing and living and being that used to fit perfectly and flow naturally. I have been given the gift of knowing that I am in a season of becoming while it’s still in process.

I don’t want to miss it this time.

Or forget it.